


In Your Head They Are Dying

by peppermintlegs



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Ambiguous Holsom, Elements of Lovecraftian Canon As Told By Wikipedia, Handwaves at Cartoony Violence, M/M, Rated Teen for swears, Slow Burn for Bitty's Introduction, Slow Burn for Zimbits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 04:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12741000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peppermintlegs/pseuds/peppermintlegs
Summary: When a mystery sickness sweeps in from the eastern seaboard, Ransom and Holster take it upon themselves to eradicate the undead that plague the living. Their mission brings them a motley crew of new friends, a renovated school-bus-turned-mobile-Haus, and near-insurmountable danger. Armed with a garden variety of weapons—four knives, two shotguns, two utility chains, a sledgehammer, a baseball bat, a chainsaw, a shovel, an axe, a cast iron skillet—and a whole lot of heart, Team Zombie Murder Squad criss-crosses the country, pillages a Wal-Mart, falls in love, and saves the world.Or, in Shitty’s words: “Sit the hell down and strap the fuck in because this is the goddamn wildest story you’re gonna hear this week.”Were we there? Was I brave?To think everything must dieFor anyone to matterGot to find any way to your wild heart





	In Your Head They Are Dying

 

 

 

 

****

**just.in.coco93** : bro do you have zombies where you are?

 **a.dam.bi.rkholtz:** you mean the Terminally Affected? yeah they’re everywhere

 **just.in.coco93:** it’s a mess here. police are having a rough time keeping it under control

 **a.dam.bi.rkholtz:** think it’ll give crossing the border much trouble?

 **just.in.coco93:** nah bro everyone’s coming into the country bc they heard that the cold slows em down. shouldn’t have a problem heading south

 **a.dam.bi.rkholtz:** brah i’m so hyped

 **just.in.coco93:** BRO SAME

* * *

 

“Dude, I passed like a million undead on the way here, and it’s only an hour drive.” Ransom pulls Holster into a hug, immediately followed by a noogie.

“I told you, man, it’s an epidemic,” Holster says. “Glad you’re safe though.”

“As if a zombie could stop me from coming here to beat your ass at MarioKart.”

* * *

 

Ransom drops his controller. “Holtzy, I thought we agreed that we’d give a warning before one of us pauses.”

“Bro, you hear that?” Holster asks, tilting his head.

“All I can hear right now is your betrayal.”

Holster shushes him. “No, seriously. There’s a noise outside. You don’t hear that?”

“It sounds like town. I don’t live in town like you do, man. There’s always noise here.”

They get up and peer out the front curtains, and there’s a handful of people milling about on the Birkholtz family’s front lawn.

“Town is weird,” Ransom observes.

Holster narrows his eyes. “No, this isn’t normal.” He turns away and makes it to the back of the house in a few steps. “Those aren’t normal people, Rans. Normal people don’t stand on your yard, not even in town.”

Ransom follows him to the back shed, where Holster hands him a shovel. “Bro. What’s this for?”

Holster comes out with a baseball bat. “Those are zombies. We gotta take care of them.”

“And by ‘take care,’ you mean ‘kill?’ Dude, I can’t kill a person!” Ransom looks at the shovel like it might bite him.

“They’re not really people, man,” Holster explains, swinging the bat onto his shoulder. “We’re doing my hometown a service. It’s only gonna get messy if we leave ‘em be.” He starts toward the front yard, and Ransom follows.

“I don’t want to get gunk on my shorts,” he mutters behind him.

Holster is large in both stature and personality, but neither really prepared Ransom for the terror he can inspire when he’s pulled up to his full height and swinging around a wooden baseball bat. It appears that a solid clock to the base of the skull will drop a zombie like a dead weight (heh), and Ransom manages to separate the head with a solid chop with his foot on the back edge of the shovel. They repeat this till the half dozen undead are re-dead on Holster’s front yard and they’ve both got grime and gore splattered up their fronts.

“ _Bro,”_ they say in unison, twin grins lighting their faces.

Holster pokes his head in the front door. “Mom! Rans and I are going out. When’s dinner?” He must get an answer, because he then shouts, “’Kay, we’ll be back by then!” He turns to Ransom, jumps off the front step, and announces, “Let’s go kill some motherfucking undead.”

Up and down the streets they patrol, laughing and joking and beheading the occasional zombie. Holster’s neighborhood is friendly, and they get invited inside for snacks more than once. They decline all invitations, stating business to attend to (zombies to kill, people to see), but get more than one glass of lemonade brought out to them anyway.

Dinner with the Birkholtz family is a riot, in Ransom’s correct opinion. Mr. Birkholtz is exactly like his son, except less singing and more grunting. Holster’s mom is where he got his good looks and bad vision. Holster’s two younger sisters, Rebecca and Halley, are still in high school and they’re gems. Holster’s dad made lasagna and his mom baked bread, and Ransom’s reminded how much he loves these people, how much he _really, really_ doesn’t want them to have to worry about zombies.

* * *

 

Holster’s had a bunk bed since he met Ransom in a chat forum ten years ago and learned they lived only an hour apart. Ransom gets top bunk, though, because despite his height, Holster has a paralyzing fear of heights. He fell out of bed a lot as a toddler, too, and his mom made him sleep on the floor till he grew up a little more.

“Holtzy?” Ransom asks that night, staring up at the ceiling.

“Yeah, bro?”

“That was cool today, with the zombies,” Ransom starts.

Holster laughs a little breathlessly. “Yeah, that sure was something. Kinda scary, though, eh?”

“Heh, _eh_.”

“Shut up, Rans. It’s ‘cause of you,” Holster protests.

Ransom giggles for a bit, then goes back to what he was saying. “Do you think we should keep doing that? Protecting people? Those things are dangerous. We did a good job, I think. We could go around towns, do a little patrol, show people how to keep them gone.”

Holster is quiet, which is extremely unlike him.

“Or we could let lots of people struggle with undead pests while we loaf around and play MarioKart till we melt our brains and join them.”

“Ah, hell, Rans, we're gonna have to travel the continent saving people from zombies, aren't we?”

“How much of your mom’s station wagon do you actually own?”

 

 

“Mom, I’m twenty-four, not six. I’m ready to face what’s left of the world head-on, you know? Part of the circle of life, or whatever,” Holster explains, while being crushed to his mother’s chest (the woman is powerful, powerful enough to make Holster wince when she reaches up to tug on his ear).

“Adam Justin Birkholtz, if you don’t come back to me alive-alive and in one piece, so help me I will _drag_ your undead butt back to this house and you’ll be washing dishes for all eternity.”

“Ellen, I completely understand your threats and will do my best to make sure Adam doesn’t get into any trouble whatsoever. Strictly zombie extermination, no funny business. We’ll have this whole deal under control by the new year, just you wait.” Ransom extracts his friend from his mother’s grip. “Plus, we’ll send letters and carrier pigeons and whatnot. What’s your astronomical address?”

Holster’s mom is duly charmed. “Oh, Justin, you’re such a sweetheart. Keep my boy safe, now, do you understand?”

Ransom drops the flippant attitude and levels his expression. “I promise, Mrs. Birkholtz. No harm will come to him under my watch.” He pulls her in for a tight hug and she squeezes back just as hard.

“Okay, we have to leave now. No tears. Not happening.” Holster closes the hatch. “I’m driving. I don’t trust that you won’t start going in the left lane, Weird Canadian Man.”

“We have the same road laws, dumbass!” Ransom protests as he gets in the passenger seat. “I’m picking the music, then.”

Holster turns to his mom. “I’ll be safe, I promise.”

Ellen smiles through teary eyes. “I know. I’ll still worry about you.”

He pulls her into a hug, more than a head taller than she is. “It’ll be okay. I’ll be back before you know it, and I’ll have saved the world and everything.” He presses a kiss into her blonde hair, the same shade as his. “I wonder if there’s any money in that.”

“There darn well better be, young man. We sent you off to a fancy school and all you’re doing is whacking zombies.” She chuckles. “I love you forever, baby.”

Holster tries to smile. “Like you for always, mama.”

They hold onto each other for a few moments, then Holster rocks her side to side. Ellen takes a deep breath and wipes at her eyes. “Go with Justin, then. Kill some zombies. Stay safe. Come home soon.”

“Love you, mom,” Holster whispers, and leans down to kiss her cheek. “Be back before you know it.” He jogs backwards to the car, waving. Opening the passenger door, he whispers to Ransom, “My glasses are fogging up; can you drive for a bit while they defrost?”

Ransom knows better. He climbs over the console anyway. Holster waves at his mom all the way down the block, hanging half-out the window till they turn the corner and she’s out of view.

Ransom pretends that he doesn’t see Holster wiping at his eyes underneath his glasses, but he still props his hand up on the console. Five miles down the highway, Holster takes it.

 

 

Hours later, Ransom scrolls through his phone while Holster suffers down I-90. “Well, Syracuse, Albany, and Boston are on this route. Syracuse’s papers haven’t put out much about the Affected, but it’s been kind of on the DL since it started. Albany’s the same, maybe a little more. Boston’s having fits, though, making headlines about it for the last week. A Dunkin’s employee became infected at the workplace and no one noticed till she started gnawing on the customer’s arm instead of taking their card? Jeez, Boston’s another world, eh?”

“Shot.”

“Damn.”

Holster changes lanes. “Yeah, let’s hit Boston. I’ve got a good feeling about it.”

“Great! It’s only another,” Ransom checks his phone, “six hours away.”

* * *

 

“This is the fucking worst traffic I’ve ever seen, and I cross the border on the regular,” Holster says, leaning his head against the window. “Can we get off this damn highway? I think I’m gonna scream.”

“Maps says there’s an exit coming up that’ll take us to Cambridge, which is a 15-ish minute drive from the city,” Ransom recites.

“Hell no, I’m not going into the city if the traffic’s like this. No. Suburbia is the place for me. Give me my cul-de-sacs or give me death.” Holster puts on his blinkah.

 

 

“I’m lost.”

“So’s Maps, bro. Cambridge is the suburb from hell, apparently,” Ransom observes, absorbed in his phone.

“Hell and rich people,” Holster amends. “That house,” he says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “cost more than both our undergrad tuitions for four years will, including textbooks.”

Ransom looks up to catch a glimpse, nods his agreement, then looks out his own window to see the other mansions on the street. “Uh, bro? This place also has a small zombie problem.”

Holster slows the car even further. “Shit. Okay, you wanna get in the back and hand up the bat and get your shovel? I’ll keep driving, and then when I stop, we get out and ambush them.”

The undead at Holster’s house had been milling about on his front lawn aimlessly, kind of looking at the hedges and fence, but these zombies are swarming some poor (not poor—absurdly wealthy) WASP’s front porch and facade, dragging at windows and brick alike, groaning like they’re out of some video game.

As he’s passing up the bat, Ransom takes a better look at the swarm. “Bro, there’s someone there already.”

Holster parks along the curb and leans across the passenger side. “Shit, you think they can handle that?” A figure with long brown hair is swinging at the undead with what looks an awful lot like a sledgehammer. “They’re not cutting off the heads—that’s the problem. The zombies don’t stay down.”

“Well, then, it is our civic duty to intervene,” Ransom says. Holster’s mom had sat them down several years ago and given them a Talk about where they should or should not meddle (the answer was _do not, under the vast majority of circumstances, unless someone is going to get hurt if you don’t_ ), and Holster has still had a little trouble with it since then. Ransom gets a good hold on his shovel and he and Holster share a nod, then get out the car and approach the skirmish.

The long-haired figure is keeping up a running commentary on the fight. “Fuck, you ugly-toothed bastard, no wonder you’re trying to eat the dentist.” Ransom and Holster come up to them, knocking back a few undead on the way.

“Need some help?” Holster has to shout over the groaning (of the undead) and cursing (of the living). He takes a moment to swat a zombie over the head, dropping it like a bag of rocks. Ransom backs him up, finishes the monster off with a swift hack and stomp to the neck.

“What-the-fuck-ever, brah, just don’t get between me and the Affected.” Now that Ransom can see their face, he’s caught off-guard by the frankly magnificent mustache almost completely masking their top lip.

After that, the squabble’s over fairly quickly. Ransom works faster than Holster, just hack-stomping behind him, so he has time enough to take care of the ones the new guy drops too. Within ten minutes, the dentist’s front yard is strewn with zombie bodies and heads, and no small amount of gore. They high-five all around, congratulating themselves, when the front door opens. Ransom and Holster turn, expecting to politely turn down a glass of lemonade with matching modest smiles, when the woman starts shouting.

Her first words are muffled by the opening of the door, but when she steps all the way out, they pick up at “—KNIGHT, I CANNOT BELIEVE I HAVE TO TELL YOU AGAIN TO GET OFF MY GODDAMN PROPERTY. TAKE YOUR FUCKING MESS AND GET THE HELL OUT BEFORE I CALL THE POLICE. JESU—”

Their new friend starts shouting back, albeit while dragging the corpses off the woman’s yard. “OH, GO TO HELL, RHONDA. WE DID YOU A SERVICE, YOU UNGRATEFUL FUCKWIT.” Ransom and Holster help with the moving, and once the bodies are all piled on the side of the street instead of on the grass, she peaceably goes back inside, threat of law enforcement unfulfilled.

“Sorry about that. She’s difficult at best.” They stick out their hand. “Shitty Knight, he/him, neighbor, civic serviceman, and Affected-killer extraordinaire. Thanks for your help; I usually have a little more space to work with, without having to worry about Rhonda’s fucking landscaping.”

Ransom shakes his hand. “No problem, man. Happy to help. I’m Ransom, this is my buddy Holster.” Holster shakes Shitty’s hand too. “So you’re local? Are there that many Affected around?”

“Nah, this is the first time they’ve shown up right in my neighborhood. I usually end up walking around town, keeping an eye around playgrounds and schools mostly. Not in a creepy way; just watching out for the kids, making sure no moms have to deal with any bullshit.” Shitty hauls up a couple bodies by the backs of their collars and starts dragging them across the road. “I’ve got a contact who takes these to the landfill where he can incinerate them. It’s easier than working around zoning laws about fires bigger than a breadbox. Which is most fires, by the way. He’ll be back in a couple hours. So you’re from Canada?”

Ransom nods somewhat dumbly, unprepared for the way Shitty jumps seamlessly from topic to topic and back again. “I’m from Toronto. Holster’s from Buffalo,” he adds, because Holster is doing most of the legwork in dragging zombies across the road.

“Right, yeah. That’s my house. My mom and dad’s. Mom’s. Shit, I don’t know anymore. I’m the only one who lives there most of the time, since mom’s always at conferences and the shitheel that calls himself a father is serving time for bullshit dumbass white-collar hedge fund crimes.” Shitty runs a hand through his long hair. “I kinda really hate it here.”

“Do you want to come with us? We’ve got room in the car, if you can travel light. We’re probably going to stick around here for a day or so and then head north while it’s still hot out.” Ransom had made a plan in the car based on the ten-day forecast and the toll roads.

“Holy shit, you are so fucking Canadian. _Oot._ ” Shitty giggles. “I’m gonna pack a duffel. You and Holster are welcome to come in, sit on the furniture, drink the wine or beer or whatever you can find. Mom won’t be back for a couple days and dad won’t be back for five to ten, with probation, because he’s a white piece of shit and the system is chock-full of institutional racism,” he rants with an edge to his voice and a scowl drooping his mustache. Ransom snag’s Holster’s wrist when they pass him on the way inside, and fills him in when Shitty takes the stairs three at a time to pack his bag.

 

 

“Rans, I swear to God, if you make me get back on I-90 I’m crashing this car into a whole fuckin’ field of undead and my actions will be justified.” Holster turns a pointed gaze to Ransom for almost a beat too long before going back to watching the road. Shitty backs him up from the backseat.

“Yeah, brah, I can’t believe you actually made it six hours on the thing. I’ve only ever been maybe a max of two on it before I start ripping my hair out, and I’m not even the one driving.” He examines the ends of his hair. “Try Route 1. That’ll get you to Maine without much trouble. And going around the city’s a pain in the ass. Getting on at Chelsea is easiest, so take,” he leans forward between Ransom and Holster, ducking down to peer at road signs, “the next left in like, I dunno, three miles or so.” Shitty sits back and starts French braiding his hair, artfully letting strands fall around his face. “After that, it’s a straight shot all the way to Maine. Few hours, but nothing like your drive from Buffalo.”

* * *

 

“Rans, hey,” Holster says, kinda quiet, before they’re on the highway. “What’s that stuff on the side of the road?”

Ransom cranes his head around, squinting at the guardrail. “Clothes? Janky ripped stuff, though. And, oh, yep, that’s a zomb. Should we stop?”

Holster has already made the turn onto a side road, keeping an eye out for parking. “Shits, you wanna pass up the shovel and bat?”

“Way ahead of you,” Shitty replies, setting the weapons (freshly hosed down at his house) on the console.

Holster finds a meter and feeds it an hour of change, then the boys begin to follow the carnage. Three blocks south, the stench starts, but the zombie parts and clothes surprisingly peter off after that. Ransom suggests that they follow their noses to what’s probably trouble, and the other two reluctantly agree.

It’s in an alley about five feet across that they find the zombies. So many of them.

Shitty whispers, “Holy fuck.”

“How many do you think there are?” Ransom asks Holster.

Holster cranes his neck. “At least ten. Lemme multiply.” He takes a couple seconds, then drops back from his tiptoes. “I’d say between fifty and sixty. The alley goes back a ways, but they’re pretty crammed in there.”

“There’s not enough space for all three of us to go in swinging,” Ransom says. “At least, you can’t go first.” He nods at Holster. “You can’t swing a bat in that tight a space.”

“Okay, so Shitty goes first. You cool with that, man?” Holster asks him.

Shitty fidgets his grip on the sledgehammer. “Abso-fuckin’-lutely, my bro. Rans gets the middle, and you get what we miss?”

Holster nods solidly. “Yeah. Okay. Go, I guess. Whenever you’re ready.”

Turns out Shitty is ready exactly then, because he turns on his heel and begins to bang on the heads of still a surprising number of undead. Ransom dutifully follows, methodically chopping off heads as fast as he can, because the monsters don’t stay down for long. Holster trails behind, kicking at severed heads to check how severed they are, and whapping at the occasional twitching limb. Shitty mows a path almost to what Holster thought was the dead end of the alley, only to find a large turnoff behind the building, three dumpsters wide and positively stuffed with Affected.

Shitty, already keeping up a stream of swearing under his breath, escalates to a shout when he sees the horde. “Unless one of you has super powers up your sleeves, we’re kind of hella fucked! I’ve only got one goddamn sledgehammer.”

“Holster!” Ransom shouts.

“Yeah, bro?”

He stomps down on his shovel what feels like the thirtieth but may be only the fifteenth time. There are so many zombies. “I’m not gonna let you die, got it?”

“Rans, if you do something stupid,” he pauses to swing at a monster.

Ransom interrupts him. “You best do the goddamn same for me. Your mom would miss me.”

Holster huffs out a laugh, not letting himself think about how relieved he is.

Shitty keeps thunking on zombie heads, each swing ending in a muted crunch. “Brahs, this show of solidarity is touching and after this, remind me to give you a talk about ‘your mom’ jokes. Now if these fuckers could all simultaneously drop dead again, that’d be fucking fantastic.” He lifts the sledgehammer again and swings, but dramatically misses, almost getting himself in the foot, because the head of the zombie he’s aiming for falls to the ground and the body collapses like a bag of rocks.

He doesn’t stop to figure that out, instead moving on to the next monster grappling at his shoulder. “What the shit. Whatever.” To Shitty’s dismay and confusion, however, this zombie drops as well, before he can hit it.

Shitty drops his arms. “Okay, what the shitballs is happening?”

Ransom is skipping the waiting for the zombies to get knocked down, simply hacking at their necks with the edge of the shovel. It’s not as effective. “Shits, now is not the time to ask questions,” but he doesn’t notice the Affected collapsing behind him.

Shitty points around. “There’s like, fuck, hang on.” He takes a moment to drop a zombie. “At least three of these things have gone down without any of us hitting them.”

“Dude, move,” a female voice says.

They don’t stop their fighting, but it’s a close thing. Holster just barrels through his confusion, keeping an ear out but not getting too distracted from swatting zombies. Ransom slows down but still ignores the new player, focusing on thoroughly decapitating each monster he comes across.

He feels a tap on his shoulder. A young Asian woman is offering him a big knife, about as long as his forearm. He grunts out thanks, and gets back to work.

A while later, far too long later, the last three zombies are decapitated simultaneously and fall to the ground in three heaps and three heads. Shitty and Holster turn to each other automatically, raising their weapons, before realizing that there aren’t anymore undead loitering. Ransom picks his way down from a four-high stack of bodies, tripping a little on his way over to the other boys. Shitty catches sight of the girl retreating out the alley, but stops her.

“Hey! New person! Come back, please!”

She stops, hesitates, and picks her way back into the pocket of space with the dumpsters, the layer of undead, and the three large men and their shed weapons. “So, you’re taking care of the pest problem, huh?” she asks, keeping her voice deliberately light.

“Yeah!” Holster nods, grinning like a loon. “Thanks so much for jumping in! That was like, super brave of you.”

“Super brave, bro,” Ransom echoes. “Thanks for the knife. Helped a shit-ton more than the shovel.”

New girl flips her own knife in her left hand. “It’s a machete. I’ve got a couple. So, uh. Who are you? Can’t be from around here. ‘Cept maybe you,” she says, shrugging at Shitty.

“Right you are, my bro,” Shitty declares, stepping dramatically forward. “Call me Shitty. He/him pronouns. New guy on the road, providing sledgehammer duties.”

Ransom and Holster introduce themselves likewise, adding on their hometowns.

“Yeah, so, I’m Larissa Duan. She/her, I guess. Whatever. I live on the other side of the block. Anyway, thanks for bringing the brawn to that mess. You can keep the knife, Ransom. I....gotta jet.” She slips her knife into a sheath strapped to her calf.

“Wait!” Shitty bounds over to her, his foot catching on a protruding knee and sailing through the air. Larissa catches him under the arms, holding him up with ease. “You can’t leave!” he protests, not bothering to pick himself up. “You already have a nickname.”

Larissa raises a dubious eyebrow, urging him to continue.

“Lardo!”

Holster grimaces and Ransom shakes his head. “Dude, don’t give a girl a nickname with ‘lard’ in it. Rule of thumb.”

Shitty scrambles upright. “No! Dudes, like, _Lar_ from _Larissa_ and _do_ from _Duan_.”

Larissa Lardo frowns slightly and nods. “‘Swawesome. But really, I should go home and—”

“Do you want to come with us?” Holster interrupts. “We’re going to Maine, I think.”

Lardo shifts her gaze from man to man, contemplating. “I still have to go home and pack a bag and explain to my _mẹ._ You can come too.”

 

 

Lardo lives in a flat with her younger brother, mom, grandma, and dad. It’s the top floor of the complex, and Holster and Ransom have to duck to get under the door frames. Lardo’s mom is tinier than her daughter and offers them tea, after requesting that they take their shoes off at the door. Lardo goes presumably to pack a bag while Shitty tries to explain the situation to her mother.

She’s having none of it. “Young man, don’t think you can take my daughter on some suicide road trip at the drop of a hat. You are a stranger, and these gentlemen are far too large for one car,” she snips, waving a spoon at Ransom and Holster, whose cups look like cups for ants in their admittedly really big hands. “My Larissa should know better.”

Lardo bustles into the kitchen, stuffing odds and ends into a backpack. “Oh, _mẹ_ , stop that. I’ll call every night, video even. Oh, phone charger.” She rushes back into the back.

“At least stay for dinner,” her mother pleads.

The boys snap to attention. Ransom treads lightly. “Only if we wouldn’t be imposing, Mrs. Duan.”

“You’re taking my daughter from me–of course you’re imposing,” she gripes. “But at least I’d get another hour or so with her.” Mrs. Duan sighs heavily and goes to dig in the pantry.

* * *

 

Mrs. Duan insists on saying goodbye on the sidewalk out front. She had wanted to walk them all the way to the car, but the boys didn’t want her walking home by herself. Lardo grumbles a little about how she “had to have learned it _somewhere_ ,” but doesn’t object beyond that. Their goodbye is quiet and relatively short, at least compared to Holster’s with his mother.

“I’ll call when we stop for the night, okay?” Lardo says to her mom.

“You had better,” Mrs. Duan says sternly. “And keep those boys in line.”

Lardo grins and nods. “Yes, mama. Okay, we really should get going. I love you.”

“I love you too, dear.” They hug briefly, then Lardo is leading the way from her home, wheeling her giant suitcase behind her.

Shitty and Holster and Ransom each shake Mrs. Duan’s hand, thanking her for supper and for being so understanding. They follow Lardo, jogging a little to catch up, and Mrs. Duan watches them till they turn the corner at the end of the block.

 

 

“So we’re going to Maine?” Lardo asks, once Holster merges onto Route 1. Ransom is still sitting shotgun, while Shitty has had to contain himself to just the passenger side.

Ransom pulls the atlas from underneath his seat. “That’s the plan, eventually. We hope to stop by a couple towns on the way, to see if we can help with the zombie problem. There’s a good motel a few towns up, so we’ll stop there for the night and then keep heading north till we wanna stop.”

She hums. “And where is this money coming from?”

Ransom jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “He’s got it.”

Lardo doesn’t mask the surprise on her face well enough, so Shitty explains. “My dad’s super rich and I took a few of his cards before we left. He won’t notice or care from prison. Mom might, but I’ll call her once she notices.”

After this speech, Lardo nods. “So you’re upper-crust. Snooty rich parents. High society and martinis for lunch,” she prods.

Shitty crinkles his nose and scowls. “I have no association with that culture. I’m using my father’s ill-gotten gains to put some good back into this world.”

Holster snorts from behind the wheel. “‘My parents live in Ohio; I live in the moment,’” he quips.

“Oh, shut _up_ ,” Ransom groans. “We don’t speak of that show.”

Lardo settles back and asks Shitty if she can play with his hair.

* * *

 

Four hours of construction later, Holster pulls into the motel parking lot with a faint sob, putting the car in park and immediately scrubbing at his eyes. Ransom sends Shitty and Lardo to get a room or two, whatever, while he digs Holster’s glasses out of his duffel bag.

“Bro, you should’ve taken those out before you got on the highway,” says Ransom, unscrewing the contact case caps one at a time.

Holster sighs in relief when he slides his glasses up his nose. “I know, man, but it was such a fuckin’ mess, and I didn’t think it’d take so long.”

“You wanna sleep?” Ransom offers.

Holster shuts his eyes and nods. “I wanna sleep so bad, dude. You have no idea.”

Ransom does have an idea. Slapping Holster’s shoulder, he says, “C’mon then. Let’s go in and get settled and we can shower and get this nastiness off us.”

Shitty and Lardo got a room with two doubles, which means not only do they have to share beds, they’ve got to navigate four people trying to schedule showers, too. Shitty goes first because his hair has to dry before he can fall asleep. Ransom and Lardo determine that they’ll share a bed and Holster and Shitty can share the other, because Rans and Holster would _not_ fit in that sorry excuse for a queen mattress. Ransom is the last to shower and plans out tomorrow’s route while he waits.

 

 

Holster makes Ransom drive the first leg the next day because his eyes are still hurting him. Lardo cracks her spine all the way up when she settles into the backseat, and Shitty makes them stop at the next Wal-Mart because there’s no way they’re sleeping on shitty motel beds again. He buys two tents, four sleeping bags, and a few pillows and throws them in the trunk. They find three undead wandering in the field next door and dispatch them with little to-do.

“Lemme know which exit, Holster,” Ransom says after a couple hours on the highway. Holster has the map on his knees but he seems to be paying more attention to his phone. “Holtzy! Which exit?”

Holster jumps and knocks his head on the roof of the car. Fumbling with the map and glancing up to catch a road sign, he hums. “You’re gonna want to go around Portland, so there’s gonna be an exit onto...fuck, what is that?” He squints at the map, holds it close to his nose. “Route 781 and then onto 95, because route 1 goes through the city, I think.”

“That’s in like, twenty miles, I think,” Ransom says, groaning and dropping his head back on the rest. “Ohhh, we’ll get somewhere eventually.”

* * *

 

Holster’s snores rattle the frame of the car so the seats vibrate and Ransom is worried to turn up the radio for fear of waking him up.

“Hey, Shits. You see any signs for 781 or I-95?” Ransoms whispers.

Shitty cranes his head. “I haven’t in a while. You need me to look at the map?” He reaches around and slides the map off of Holster’s lap. “Where are we?”

“Oh, for chrissakes,” Lardo sighs, pulling the map towards her. She looks up once and then back down at the map. “You missed your exit. You’re headed towards a big smudge of grease right now.”

“Cock balls motherfucking tits,” Ransom swears.

Shitty raises his eyebrows, impressed.

* * *

 

Holster is awake and hungry, even though he hasn’t mentioned it. Ransom can tell from his bouncing knee.

“I’m stopping and asking for directions,” Ransom announces. “That’s our food break, too.”

Lardo argues her way to a Dunkin, where she and Shitty split a dozen donuts and Holster slurps at an iced coffee bigger than his big head. Ransom asks one of the gawky teenagers working there how to get west, and he and his coworkers bicker about it till someone tells him to take 27 and follow that a ways. He thanks them, buys a sandwich, and herds his friends out to the car.

Holster drives while Ransom tries to navigate by the light of his phone. Service is spotty where they are, and Shitty’s taking it the hardest, trying to pull up articles about the Terminally Affected. He’s been going on about them since dinner.

“See, the purported cause is prescription meds abuse, which is, like, way bigger a fuckin issue than anyone wants to admit. So it spread without a lot of people noticing, and—”

Ransom cuts him off. “FDA approved meds wouldn’t cause side effects like that.”

“Maybe not for the people they’re testing on, but way more neurotypical people abuse meds than the FDA wants to acknowledge. It’s like, this whole stigma thing against neurodivergence and mental illness already with people appropriating OCD and anxiety and depressions and like ‘LOL im so bipolar!’ but misdiagnosis and underdiagnosis is all too common these days and meds are too accessible to people who don’t need them, so, like, if people who have prescriptions are irresponsible or whatever, that’s, like, something that needs addressed.”

He continues, but Holster leans over to Ransom. “I’ve really gotta pee. Coffee went straight through me.”

Ransom rolls his eyes. “You drank like a gallon of it, bro. We can just find somewhere to camp out. Let’s try to get closer to the highway, though. Maybe take this turn?” He points to a sign indicating a turn in a few hundred yards.

Holster takes it and has to flick on his brights because there aren’t any more streetlights. The road is winding and hasn’t been striped in what must be a while. He slows to a crawl, finding a service road about three miles out. “I’m stopping here. There’s nothing around,” he explains to his passengers. They find enough space for the two tents between the trees and Lardo tells Shitty that they’re sharing a tent.

Ransom feels gross going to bed without a shower, but they didn’t fight that many zombies today, so he can overlook that. He and Holster settle in and he hears Holster whisper his name. “Yeah, bro?”

“It’s dumb, but I miss being at home, you know?” Holster’s never quiet like this.

Ransom crinkles his nose. “I know. Your mom’s the coolest. And, like, MarioKart.”

Holster sniffles wetly. “Shit, bro, you didn’t even get to give your mom a proper goodbye.”

Ransom had forgotten that. “Holtzy?”

“Hm?”

“You mind cuddling a little?” He doesn’t really like the way his throat gets tight at the end.

Holster wiggles his sleeping bag over till he and Ransom are pressed side-by-side. “Thought you’d never ask, bro.”

 

 

Ransom jolts awake to rustling outside. Honestly, he’s surprised the sunlight hadn’t woken him already, or the fact that Holster is trying to kill him with his giant, heavy arm right across the top of Ransom’s chest. Sunlight filters in on his side of the tent, turning the blue nylon translucent with white light. There’s a sheen of sweat all over him in the cleanest way, even though he’s still got dirt on his forearms. He shoves Holster’s arm off him so he can breathe, which jostles Holster into consciousness.

“Bro. Let me rest,” says Holster groggily.

Ransom wriggles out from his sleeping bag. “You drank all that coffee right before you fell asleep and it fucked with your rhythms, man. This is on you.” Ransom pulls a clean-ish shirt on. _Note to self: find a laundromat. And quarters._ “There’s also something outside, which means you’ve gotta get your bat and we’ve got to kill it or scare it off.”

Holster groans but has the presence of mind to do so quietly, at least. “It’s too morning for this. All right.” He shoves the sleeping bag to his ankles and rolls around till it comes off him, then settles his baseball bat in his grip, rolling it a couple times to warm up his joints. “Allons-y.”

Holster unzips the tent door and steps out first, Ransom on his heels.

Shitty and Lardo are woken to sustained panicked yells outside their tent. They hurry to see what all the commotion is about, Lardo leading the way with her machete and Shitty scrambling out of a striped pajama shirt.

Shitty shouts, too, at the scene that greets them. Then Lardo throws her hands up, knife and all, like a cut off from the conductor of an orchestra. They fall silent, awaiting her cue.

She points her knife at the new guy. “Who the fuck are you.”

He’s a brawny ginger kid, around their age, it looks like, and about Ransom’s height. In his hands is a chainsaw. “Will Poindexter. You’re trespassing on my property.”

“You’re patrolling your property on a beautiful summer morning armed with a chainsaw?” Lardo asks dubiously.

“I’m keeping an eye out for the Terminally Affected. They’ve been bad this week. Nearly ate my brother. Why are you trespassing?” Will Poindexter is frowning.

Lardo lowers her knife. “We’ve been hunting undead as well. Came up from Boston. We got a little lost and needed a place to camp. Sorry about trespassing—we’ll pack up and be gone in no time.”

Will cocks his head. “You’re going around and hunting them?”

They all nod.

He glances at his chainsaw, then at Holster’s bat, Lardo’s and Ransom’s knives, Shitty’s balled-up pajama shirt. “With those?”

Shitty waves his shirt. “I have a sledgehammer.”

Will nods distractedly. “Pack up. Can I hitch a ride back to my house?”

They do and he does, crams himself into the backseat with Lardo on the hump in the middle, leaning at every slight turn. Will directs them to a shabby but clean farmhouse, tall and narrow like a tissue box on its end. A couple out-buildings dot the yard: a shed, what might one day be a barn, what is definitely an outhouse. Will beckons them inside, leads them to the kitchen.

“You like bacon or sausage?”

They hem and haw their way to bacon. Will peels a few slices from a paper-wrapped package and starts them on the griddle.

“You’re going to want to amp up your weaponry if you want to be effective in hunting and killing the Affected. The bat’s a good idea, but the sledgehammer is better. You want something not just blunt but with real punch behind it, that’ll cause real damage.” As he’s saying this, Will measures out Bisquick and milk and stirs it up. “The machetes are a good touch, but how long will they last as sharp as they are to work well? With a few modifications and some extra tools, you could probably double your overall effectiveness, depending on if you go till your weapons give out.”

Ransom frowns thoughtfully and asks, “What sort of modifications?”

Will flips the bacon and sighs. “Your bat, for example,” he says, pointing at Holster.

Holster realizes that he hasn’t introduced himself and promptly does so, shaking Will’s hand. He’s got a firm grip, calloused and a little dry.

“Your bat, Holster, is not nearly gritty enough to be a proper zombie-killing weapon. Nails through the end or barbed wire wrapped around could still allow you the blunt force while also providing you with the ability to drag your victim down as well. Maybe with the right twist you could even remove the head.”

Holster gapes. Ransom works it through in his head, conjecturing angles and imagining fight scenarios. Lardo nabs a strip of bacon straight from the hot plate.

“You like my sledgehammer, though?” Shitty asks, with all the air of a teacher’s pet.

“It’s an interesting touch, because it _can_ cause so much damage, but you’re somewhat limited by range and movement. A sledgehammer is super effective, but it’s only one move, which can be undesirable in close quarters.” He shrugs and pours pancake batter into a few dollops on the griddle. “Hang on a sec.” Will leaves the kitchen but they can still hear his footsteps, and they definitely hear him scream, “BREAKFAST!” to the upstairs.

Holster chirps him when he gets back. “Don’t know why you even bothered leaving the room, bro.”

Thundering comes from the ceiling and Will half-smiles. “They don’t move unless they’re scared.”

Half a dozen redheaded kids file into the kitchen, each picking up a task: setting the table, slicing fruit, trailing behind Will to clean up after him, among other things. None of them says a single word, most eyes only partially-opened, barely taking notice of the four guests trying to get out of their way.

Minutes later, they all find themselves sat around a rickety wooden table, mountains of pancakes and bacon and fruit piled before them. Will and his redheads link hands and his new friends do the same, and Will says a short blessing and then they dig in. Pancakes and cream and fruit slowly disappear (the bacon goes quickly) to silence but for the sound of chewing. Like good house guests, Holster and Shitty help clean up when everyone is finished, Shitty washing dishes and Holster drying. Will tucks the dishes away into their cupboards while the redheaded kids wipe down the table.

Will appears to be the oldest of them by a couple years. A taller girl, slenderer than Will, looks like the second eldest. She stays in the kitchen with Ransom and Lardo while the younger kids disappear. Will leans on the counter. “Esther, why don’t you introduce yourself?”

Esther, apparently, fluffs her hair. “I’m Will’s sister Esther. You didn’t get to talk to any of the others, didja? Mary-Catherine, Peter, Pádraigín, John, Joshua? They’re good kids, work real hard.”

Shitty blinks a lot. “That’s…a lot of siblings.”

Esther shrugs. “We work with what we’ve got. They’re a lot of help around here.”

Will bops the countertop and announces, “These guys are hunting Affected. I’m gonna help ‘em, see what I can do to make it easier for them.”

“Let me know if you need anything,” Esther offers. She stands, nods at the guests, and whirls out of the kitchen, long hair swishing behind her.

Lardo cocks her head inquisitively at Will. “You’re going to help us?”

“You have a baseball bat, a shovel, two knives, and a sledgehammer. You need help.” He pauses, wrings a dish towel in his hands. “C’mon with me, we’ll check out the shed.”

The shed is bigger than it looked from the road. Will opens it up to reveal something between a utility shed and a workshop. He claps his hands nervously and bounces on the balls of his feet. “It’s not much, but it’s something more than what you’ve got in the back of that car.” Beckoning to Holster, he continues. “You come here and help me reach. One of you wanna get your weapons so we can work on ‘em?”

Lardo and Shitty go, leaving Ransom and Holster to help, even though Ransom and Will are the same height. Will directs them to all corners of the barn, fetching hammers and nails and fencing and a heavy table. He opens up the table and plugs it into the wall, and Ransom and Holster watch in amazement as the thing on it comes to life, spinning and buzzing and glowing a little. He reaches behind him and fits a welding mask over his head, then flips the switch and the wheel thing hums to a halt.

Shitty and Lardo come back, laden with too many weapons, really. Will picks out the sledgehammer, easily flipping it around to the grip he wants. “Move back, now,” he commands, shooing them away. They ease back at first but skitter when he turns the table thing on and starts grinding at the back end of the sledgehammer. They watch wide-eyed but for Lardo, who peers at the machine like she’s calculating how to get one of her own.

After a few minutes of horrible crunching noise, it quiets and Will turns off the table. He sets down the sledgehammer and lifts his mask, wiping at his face with his elbow, which leaves black streaks on his forehead and cheeks.

“Okay, the bat now.” Will holds out his hand expectantly, and Shitty scoots forward enough to hand it to him. “Holster, come watch.”

Holster hands him long nail after long nail, watching in amazement as each goes through the bat like butter to poke out the other side. After there are a sufficient number of nails emerging from the end of the bat, Will has Holster hold the bat and turn it while he himself weaves barbed wire in between the nails. When he’s done, he turns the bat over entirely to Holster. “Get used to the weight; just carry it around. Don’t swing it around people except in a fight, got it?”

Holster nods earnestly, shifting his grip on the handle. “This is cool as fuck, man. Thanks, like, a million for doing this.”

Will shrugs one shoulder. “Better than you four sleeping unarmed in two tents.”

He goes back to the spinny table, grinding away at the sledgehammer. When he stops, he dips the end of it in a bucket nearby, and it makes a hissing sound when it hits the water. Will presents the modified sledgehammer to Shitty, showing off the new pointed back of it. “This’ll make your backswing smoother and more effective, and you’ll be able to pierce your target if you want to, by altering your grip like this,” and he twists his arm.

Shitty vibrates with excitement. “You’re coming with us, right?” he asks, fidgeting his fingers on the sledgehammer’s handle.

“I can’t leave my family,” Will says, taken aback. “I’m not leaving Esther to take care of them by herself.”

Lardo’s mellow voice pipes up. “They do pretty well without supervision, it looks like.”

Will opens his mouth to reply, but gets interrupted by shouting from outside. “I swear to God, Josh, if you’re screwing with the gear instead of dusting like I _told_ you to, there’ll be—” Esther cuts off when she sees Will and their guests looking at her a little fearfully. “You aren’t Josh.”

They shake their heads no. “Lardo was trying to convince me to go with them,” Will tattles to her, because Esther in a fuss strikes fear into all.

Lardo cuts a glare at him, and he flinches a little.

Esther smiles at them benevolently. “Will, you can go if you want to. We’ve got our work cut out for us here. It’s all routine. Mary-Catherine and I can take up your patrol, if you’re worried about that.”

Will scowls. “That makes me feel worse. Peter should do it.” Shitty has the presence of mind to muffle his hiss of disapproval.

Esther’s hackles raise, as does her right eyebrow. “William, do not start that masculine bullshit with me. Mary-Catherine and I are much more capable than Peter would be on his own, and we could get it done quicker than you can. It’s not that we don’t need you,” she comforts when she sees the sour pucker of his lips, “it’s that you’d be doing more good for the world if you went with them instead of keeping our routine here.”

Will levels a stare back at Esther, while the company shifts uncomfortably during the staring contest. After half a minute of tense silence, Will blinks away and sighs so heavily that he gets a couple inches shorter for a moment. “Fine. Fine, I’ll go with these crazy people on a futile endeavor that really can only end in pain and suffering.” He keeps muttering as he goes to pack up the shed, returning the table to its corner all on his own and herding them out once he’s done.

Will tells Esther where the cargo carrier is for the car. “I’m gonna go pack a bag. D’y’all have detergent?” Holster shakes his head, and Will jogs into the house.

Esther leads the way to their basement. “Will means well, he really does. He gets a little protective sometimes. Plus he’s cranky.” Ransom recognizes the plastic container and hefts it up, holding it on his shoulder. Esther continues, “He does take good care of us, does too much, but we will get on fine without him. You’ll like him a lot, and he’ll take good care of you.”

Lardo asks the million-dollar question. “Where are your parents?”

Esther clears her throat, looks at her feet on the way up the steps to the main floor. Her voice is much quieter when she explains, “They’re in Arizona. They were visiting family friends for a week right when the Terminally Affected became national news. Flights have basically stopped, unless you’ve got all kinds of medical paperwork, and we don’t have the kind of money for them to rent a car to come back. They skype or call every other night or so, but it’s been about a month and the younguns are missing them. Will took charge without them asking, because he knows what’s best for us, but we don’t know when they’ll be able to come back.”

“Can’t their friends help them out somehow?” Ransom asks, matching Esther’s low pitch.

“They own a vet clinic way out from their home, and they can’t leave and they can’t loan our parents their car. Money’s tight for them too, and it would be too much to ask. They’re being so kind already, letting our parents stay with them for this long without planning on it.” She sounds somber but not unhappy. “We’re doing okay without them, but it would be nice to know that we can help keep each other safe, instead of worrying till the next time they call us.”

Holster and Ransom share a look on their side of the hamburger. Holster says to Esther, “I mean, that’s kind of what we’re doing, dragging Will away from you guys.”

She shakes her head, hair swishing around her face. “No, no. If he really didn’t want to go, no one could make him. He obviously likes you guys enough to bring you back here and help you out, and now he’s getting in that little car with you and traveling to who knows where. Will’s been out of school for a couple years now and hasn’t really been around people his own age since then, and he needs it. You must be good for him.”

Lardo bumps her shoulder into her. “We’ll do our best to keep him safe, I promise.”

Will exits the house then, straightening the strap of his bag over his shoulder. “What are you doing standing around? We’ve got zombies to kill and a highway to find!” This launches the others into action, loading duffels and tents into the cargo carrier and fastening the straps to the car. Esther gets progressively more fidgety, moving from wringing her hands to clutching at the hem of her shirt.

They wait in the car for Will to bid his farewell. Esther goes last, telling him, “Come back in one piece or I’ll kick your ass,” to which Will replies, grinning, “Don’t fucking cuss in front of the goddamn kids,” before hugging her tight and kissing the top of her head. “Stay safe, kiddo.”

Will gets in the backseat of Holster’s mom’s station wagon and won’t admit to keeping his nose pressed to the window long after his house is out of sight.

“Where are we headed?” he asks mostly to Ransom, who has the map spread out across most of the front half of the car.

Ransom runs his index finger along various roads. “Let’s go west. Maybe take 304? We’ll see.”

“You gotta go north, then, up to route 1,” Will instructs, leaning over Shitty in the middle seat to point. “It’s a pain in the ass but somehow you got out here to the boonies, so you gotta get back.”

Shitty at this point has taken off his shirt and sprawled himself partially on Lardo.

She jabs two fingers into his ribs. “Dude, you’re manspreading. Quit.”

He jumps and schools himself so he doesn’t cross his middle-seat boundary. “How come I’m on the hump?”

“We _just_ got in the car, Shits, can’t you sleep or something?” Holster asks from behind the wheel.

Shitty manages silence for a solid minute. A full sixty seconds. Then he turns to Will. “Your name is kinda boring compared to ours.”

Will refuses to get riled up. “This is true. You go by Shitty. I’m pretty sure ‘Holster’ is not his Christian name.”

“Jewish,” Holster corrects.

“Sure. And Ransom. And Lardo. My name is William. Sometimes my gran would call me Billy. Don’t do that.” Will starts picking at a cuticle.

“Poindexter, right?” Ransom asks. Will nods. “‘Dex’ is cooler than ‘Will,’ for the record.”

Will sits back, shuts his eyes. “Whatever. We need a bigger car. This is ridiculous,” he adds, as Shitty leans onto him so he can rest, because what sinner can sleep sitting up, Lardo.

 

 

They’ve been in the car for three days, only made it to the western side of New Hampshire, and Dex’s legs have been cramped more often than not. His little bottle of shampoo has only been used once when they found a town with a YMCA, and he’s ready to walk back to Edgecomb instead of tapping his toes till Shitty stares at him to make him stop.

They’ve stopped in a handful of towns on their trip, wandering about till they kill off a few undead. Dex is scarily efficient with his chainsaw, but the others have the advantage of unobtrusiveness, which they prefer the further into town they get.

Dex also shares a tent with Holster and Ransom, which could be worse, but he can’t figure out whether they’re dating. They hold hands sometimes, and compliment each other a lot, and he wakes up to find them cuddling, but the number of “bros” that slip into conversation _must_ mean something? Holster and Ransom are also by no means small boys or even average, and neither is Dex, so one tent for the three of them is tight to say the least.

It’s when _Dex_ wakes up spooned in Holster’s arms instead of Ransom that he puts his foot down. “We need different arrangements. This isn’t working out.”

It’s a coincidence that leads them to a junkyard teeming with Affected. The place is five acres at the least, and really seems more like a dump than the “Johnson's Scrap" that the fading wooden sign declares. Holster leads the way to a dilapidated shack that looks like the most likely place an owner would be, but it's empty. Unlocked, though, so they let themselves in and shuffle through the papers and knickknacks that are crammed onto every surface. Ransom unearths a map of the place, thank goodness, and they divide it into fifths, each one of them covering a section of the property. Dex gets a back corner, so he grabs his chainsaw and canvas jacket and gets to hoofing.

Dex swipes at undead when he comes across them till he gets to his corner. It's mostly junked cars in this section, all rusted and missing windows and doors. He winces in hurt when he passes classics with beautifully intact frames but that are completely gutted otherwise, knowing how hard it is to find parts for older models. The cars get more and more varied as he travels deeper, changing from compacts and sedans to vans and trucks, even a few buses lined up like cigars. He wanders around, listening over the guttering of the chainsaw for the rustling of zombies. Dex can't imagine why they're here, of all places, considering their penchant for chewing on people. He covers the space he needs to in a long back-and-forth, sawing the heads off of twenty or so undead over the course of it.

Instead of going back to the group, or maybe finding Shitty to make sure he's using the sledgehammer right, Dex scopes out the cars, seeing what's in the best shape. There's a VW minibus from the 80s that has all its windows but is missing most of the dashboard and driver's seat. He knows they need a bigger car. Maybe one where they can sleep in the back? He eyeballs the buses again, finally hoisting himself into a faded school bus that has all its windows and driving fixtures. Some of the bench seats are out of commission, slashed and oozing stuffing and springs, but the structure of the thing is surprisingly intact. There's no key that he can find, so he makes his way back to the owner's shed, remembering to grab his chainsaw on the way.

Lardo runs into him on his way back, walking with him and catching up.

"I got about a dozen in the section? Not too many, but I didn't expect any at all," she reports. "Where you going?"

Dex explains his idea, making a point to say that it probably won't work, because it probably won't. The bus is old, from what he can tell, and it's in the junkyard for a reason. Lardo _hms_ at that, remaining dutifully cool about it all. She helps him tear apart the office space for a key, eventually coming onto a whole drawer of keys, none of which are labeled. Dex doesn't bother digging through, just pulls the deep drawer all the way out and carrying it out. He leads the way, Lardo trailing behind and keeping an eye out for zombies. Holster finds them, too, and falls into step at the rear. The buses come into view soon enough, and Holster starts vibrating with excitement.

"Bro, are we gonna steal this bus? Hella rad," Holster says, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet.

"We're not stealing," Dex explains, settling into the driver's seat of the bus and balancing the drawer on his lap. "We're seeing if the bus works, and if it does, we might fix it up so I can stretch out my legs and Shitty has somewhere to drape himself instead of on Lardo.”

"I don't really mind it," Lardo says coolly. "He sweats a lot, though."

Dex finds a key that fits in the ignition, then turns it. The engine coughs and sputters, then dies. Dex sighs in relief while Lardo barely grins and Holster's eyes are bugging out he's so excited. Dex turns the bus back off and hauls himself out to check under the hood of the bus. Holster goes off to find Shitty and Ransom and drag them out to see Dex's skill and brilliance. Lardo finds a wrench nearby and starts removing the worst seats from where they're bolted to the floor and tossing them out the rear door.

"Oh, thank God," Dex shouts, leaned back toward the sky.

"What's up?" Lardo shouts back.

Dex slams the hood shut and clambers onto the bus. "The spark plugs are bad. That's the only thing wrong. This is the best bus ever and we're taking her." He scoops keys back into the drawer. "What are you doing?"

Lardo dusts off her hands and sticks the wrench in her back pocket. "We won't need all these seats, and we could make it a little more comfortable? There's so much junk around that we could definitely find something to make this beautiful beast of a bus more homey."

Dex is hit with on overwhelming sense of possibility. All this...stuff...and it's there, ready to be used. No trips to JoAnn Fabrics or Ernie's Hardware or godawful K-Mart. Anything he could need, and it's in this 5-acre junkyard in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire.

Well, almost anything. "Lards, do you wanna decorate her? Make her beautiful? You could paint her, cover the seats—Lardo, we could do whatever we want to this bus!" He's already mapping it out in his head. "There's five of us, but you've been picking up strays at an incredible rate. I'd say, oh, nine beds maximum? Bunked three high, all the way in the back by the exit in case of an emergency. And a weapons chest! With hooks!" Dex is jogging up and down the center aisle, pointing and gesturing almost faster than Lardo can keep up.

She grabs his shoulder the next time he comes past. "You draw me a diagram, we'll work out what we need, then you can delegate. This is your baby now, Dex."

They spend an hour measuring and diagramming what they want, amassing a list of supplies they'll need and tasks they need to complete. Ransom and Shitty are duly pleased and impressed about Dex's plan, and Holster still looks like exclamation points are hovering over his head. Shitty picks up where Lardo left off, pulling up damaged seats and tossing them from the bus. Ransom and Lardo take the car into the nearest town for paint and fabric and some hardware. Dex spends a couple hours elbow-deep in the engine, fiddling and fine-tuning till Lardo and Ransom come back with a few new spark plugs. Holster finds window cleaner in the office shed and does the inside and the outside of the windows.

Dex gets all worked up and excited whenever he pictures the stack of bunks in the back, the couch and booth in the front, the shower and bathroom system he's going to hook up soon. He finds himself whistling, too: cheerful tunes that remind him of home without the pang of homesickness.

Lardo and Ransom return with the things that need to be new: paint, fabric, and foam for cots, mostly. They spend a day deep-cleaning the interior and scrubbing the exterior. The windows are open at all hours, airing out the stale smell of dust and kids built up over the years. They sleep in their tents for a couple nights, soundly and deeply, refreshed when they wake up. Shitty finds a wardrobe and sweeps it out to use as weapons storage. Lardo paints the floor and the outside in bright geometric patterns to her own specifications. Ransom unearths a trough that they spray out and install as the base for a shower.

Holster provides something they didn't think they needed, but end up welcoming all the same. While searching for scrap wood that looks solid enough to be reused as bed frames, he comes across an overstuffed armchair that he hoists onto his shoulders without a second thought.

It's green. Ugly green. It may not have always been that precise color. Ransom pokes at it, expecting bugs or other critters to crawl out in droves. None do, but his finger comes away with a sticky residue that he can't really wipe off on his shorts. Holster beams with pride at his contribution, suggesting that it replace the driver's seat, because they'll be logging "hella hours, and ass cramps are a thing, trust me."

Lardo looks on in horror at the stains stretching across the back of it and measures fabric in her head. They might, _might_ have enough to reupholster the thing, after fumigating it.

Shitty looks just as excited as Holster does, and even Dex is mentally making a list of steps and supplies to install it. "Yeah, sure. The bus is supposed to be a step up in comfort from your average car, I guess."

Shitty hums thoughtfully and somewhat loudly, so everyone is paying attention to him. "We should name her."

Lardo sighs. "I presume you've got a name in mind?"

His face lights up, making it obvious that he was hoping she'd say just that. "I mean, she's a step up from a car, right? A living space as much as one for traveling. Perhaps, dear gentlemen and Lardo, she is a home, or rather, a house." He does a little shimmy at the end of it, eyebrows raised at the punchline, but his audience sits patiently and stoically on, waiting for the joke. "Oh! H-A-U-S Haus, not house like the English noun. German! It's quirky!"

The rest of them make quick eye contact, enough to nod and approve of it. Lardo details their bus's new name on the affixed stop sign in precise Gothic lettering.

Within a week, the Haus is finished. It has couches, hidden countertops, a full bath, nine beds, a wardrobe, storage under the seating and under the bus itself, and an armchair instead of a driver's seat. The engine runs, growls along low and gravelly, and the windows are clean and open. Dex sneaks the materials for installing an air conditioning unit in storage still, but they want to get back on the road. Holster needs to stop back in Buffalo and return his mom's car, and they need to get the Haus licensed and fill her up with diesel. Dex is on cloud nine, he's so proud of his their work.

Ransom wants to drive it first. Dex obliges, first perching on a couch, then patrolling the center of the bus as it moves, watching out for anything that shifts out of place. Their weaponry is firmly snapped into the back of the wardrobe so it doesn’t even rattle, and Lardo takes the time she deserves to break in the top bunk she’s claimed as her own.

 

 

Lardo wakes up to Shitty and Ransom singing a round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” that should probably be long over, if Dex’s soft sigh through his nose is anything to go by. She buries her face in the new pillow, indulging in the little pang of homesickness she gets at the song.

She flips up the side of the blanket and hops out of her bunk, landing harder on her heels than she intends. Wincing and shaking out her ankles, Lardo makes her way to the front of the bus where Dex is driving, looking all too comfortable in the now-pink polka-dot armchair. There’s still a big gap in the back where she ran out of fabric to cover it, but Lardo’s hoping to come across a nice big panel to patch it in one. It’s not a pressing issue.

“How you holding up?” she asks softly, perching on the wide rolled arm of the chair. She goes to pet his hair, but notices the greasiness of it in time to settle for resting her hand on his shoulder.

Dex jolts into good posture, shaking his head of cobwebs. “Damn, Lardo, I didn’t even hear you.”

She almost smiles. “You’ve been driving a while?” There are dark circles under his eyes, and when he blinks his eyes don’t seem to want to come back open.

“Few hours? They’ve been doing drinking songs for a while now. Time isn’t real,” Dex says in a monotone, staring dead-eyed out the windshield. “The only real thing is the ass of Holster’s car. I haven’t seen anything else in decades, Lardo. Decades.”

Lardo smirks at that. “I’ll call Holster, get him to stop at the next breakfast place. Hang in there, kiddo.”

“You’re only two years older than me,” Dex mutters.

Lardo already has the phone pressed to her ear. “I’m an oldest child, too,” she says with a fond grin.

 

 

Holster leads them to a small town’s local diner with cracked red vinyl booths and a floor that may have been black and white but is now a gray-and-gray checkerboard. He goes in before the rest of them and picks out a table, crammed into the front corner between dingy plate glass and a framed vintage football jersey hung on the wall adjacent.

“They’ve got pancakes, waffles, French toast, and eggs,” Holster announces as they seat themselves. “No fresh fruit or anything like that, but the owner said they’ve got staples.”

They devolve into chatter about a real hot meal not from a drive-thru, Shitty getting overly excited about pancakes from a griddle. It’s been less than two weeks now, but Lardo is already accustomed to his conspiracy theories about the Pink Stuff and mutated chickens. She lets him talk and he lets her brush his hair—it’s a win-win for them.

A waitress with pink hair and ashy blonde roots sashays over, chomping on gum. “C’n I get’cha?” She cocks her hip and drags the end of her pen on her notepad, looking utterly bored.

Dex wastes no time in ordering a pot of coffee. “Please tell me you have coffee,” he pleads, amber eyes hollow with the drag of a few hundred miles of road behind them.

“Yeah,” _chomp_ , “we got reg’lar an’ decaf. None a’ the fancy milk stuff, though.”

He sighs in relief. “I’ll take a whole pot of regular. Cream with it. And a short stack?”

“Sure thing, kid,” the waitress says, even though she can’t be older than he is.

The rest of them order, various iterations of pancakes and eggs and another pot of coffee to share, and the girl waltzes back away, about as hurried as her gum chewing.

Holster produces the atlas from his mom’s car. “We’re around here,” he says, pointing to the middle of Connecticut. “We’ve been going the wrong way for _hours_ because _someone_ ,” he looks pointedly at Ransom, “didn’t want to ride with me to navigate.”

Ransom makes a face. “You know I love you, bro, but you don’t let me sing.”

Dex also makes a face. “You’ve been driving _wherever_ for hours? I’ve been following you for _hours_ and you haven’t known where you’re going?”

“Hey,” Holster points a finger at him across the table. “You didn’t notice that we were heading south instead of west.”

“Neither did you!” Dex is an alarming shade of red. “I haven’t slept in a day!”

Shitty jumps into the conversation. “Brah, you should _not_ have been driving, probably.”

Dex doesn’t even look at him. “Holster, either someone has to ride with you or you follow the bus. Shitty, I can’t have any more drinking songs. You suck at singing.”

Ransom leans over the atlas. “So we need to head northwest now? BRO.”

Holster leans forward too, almost headbutting the coffeepot their waitress is setting on the table. “Whoa, sorry. Lemme get that.” He takes the pot from her and sets it down, then helps her with mugs. “There we go. Thank you!” He turns back to Ransom. “What is it?” Dex pours himself a cup and slumps over it, breathing the steam and falling a little asleep.  
“We’re here, right?” Ransom asks, pointing. Holster nods. “We should hit up the city. There’s gotta be undead, like, everywhere. And, dude, I’ve never been.”

Holster smacks the table, jolting Dex out of his dozing. “That’s that! We’re going to New York City.”

Dex opens his mouth but Lardo speaks first. “We can’t take a bus to New York City. I don’t care how deserted it might be.”

Dex nods, not even having opened his eyes yet. “We could take a train in,” he suggests.

“What about the chainsaw? And the bat? We can’t get on a train with weapons like that.” Shitty pulls at the end of his mustache.

Dex slurps his coffee. It tastes like dirt, but he’s put enough sugar in that it’s palatable. “I brought cases for them.”

 _Cases_ turns out to be the most literal of terms: Dex had collected a handful of musical instrument cases and stashed them in the underneath of the bus, lashed together with bungee cords so they don’t rattle around.

They pass for a group of music majors, probably. Maybe not Holster, but they shuffle him towards the middle so he looks less like a babysitter and more like a large trombone player.

Ransom navigates for Holster while Lardo drives the bus and Dex catches a power nap. Shitty compares map after map on his phone, with Ransom on the line in the other car. “We could catch a train and then there’s an hour walk to a subway station...no, yeah, that sounds better. Yep, like a baby. Needed it, too.”

Lardo parks the bus well in a lot near the subway station an hour later. They collect their weapons and the instrument cases while Shitty goes to buy tickets for them. The train is a handful of minutes away so they wait patiently while Ransom and Holster patter back and forth what they want to visit. Lardo chimes in that the park might be nice this time of year, so they make that their destination.

The train is empty when it arrives. Dex settles in and watches the display board blink with every new stop, where a handful of people board each time. Holster tries to take up as little space as possible with his big body, but he still gets a few deadpan glares before they get off the train half an hour later.

The park is lovely, and mostly deserted. With good reason, they find out: the place is teeming with undead.

“Should we kill them?” Lardo asks, cocking her head at the half dozen making their way around the lake.

Shitty looks over his shoulder. “I dunno, man. It still feels like we’re being watched, you know?”

Dex understands. It’s eerie being in the center of the city, seeing huge skyscrapers over his shoulder, but wandering in a quiet, abandoned pocket of it all. “Lards, did you see the ducks?”

They spend the day traipsing the city, gawping at the buildings and the people alike. Undead are scarce in the busier parts, or at least harder to find. Holster loses his shit at Rockefeller Center because he’s 30 Rock trash. They loiter there for too long, crammed onto two benches and people watching, Holster with his eyes peeled for Tina Fey.

“Holtzy, you realize they don’t film here, right? It’s a studio in Queens,” Ransom points out after the first hour.

“You think I don’t know that, bro? Of course I know that. Queens is just so out of the way… You don’t think we could fit that in today, do you?” He leans over to look at the other bench. “Lards, do we have time to go to Queens?”

The deadpan look she levels at him is answer enough.

They get pizza for a late dinner and walk uptown to kill time before they catch the last train back to the bus. They wait on an eerily empty platform, Lardo and Shitty perusing the many flyers stuck in layers to a wall. The train comes, and the haul into an empty car, the next one down looking surprisingly packed for a late night train further north.

Ransom wanders to the end, presses his face against the window and cups his hands around his eyes so he can see. “Uh, guys? There’s a lot of Affected in this car,” he says.

Holster and Lardo crowd him. “Shit,” Lardo says. “Make sure you’ve got your stuff. We’re gonna help out.”

Instead of asking questions like he wants to and like Holster is, Dex stands by the rear door of the car and keeps an eye on Lardo. She leads the way off the train at the next stop, and they all run to catch the doors of the zombie car.

The monsters are swarming vaguely, not coordinated enough to leave the train or do anything more than groan and bump into each other. Dex pulls the chainsaw from his baritone case and revs it up, seeing his friends do the same with their weapons in the corner of his eye.

They’re more careful than usual. They don’t want to damage the inside of the car, and the zombies aren’t violent enough to warrant anything more than, really, casual decapitation. As they kill their way down the car the undead start to gain a little more focus, but Dex pushes a little faster, looks behind himself a little less often. He doesn’t bother taking a break when the train stops since he doesn’t expect to run into anyone, considering the time of night and the line they’re on. The doors close again just as he’s sawing off the head of the last zombie, and he watches it crumple into a headless heap at his feet.

“Holy shit,” someone says from the far end of the car.

They all turn at the voice, Dex forgetting that his chainsaw is still running and accidentally nicking the pole in the middle of the aisle. He powers the saw off absentmindedly as they all make their way towards the stranger.

Shitty laughs. “Nursey? Holy fuck. What’re the odds?” Not a stranger, then.

Nursey, apparently, raises his eyebrows. “Shitty? What are you doing in New York?”

“Brah, we’re killing zombies like we’re gettin’ paid. We’re not getting paid. Everything’s out of pocket thanks to Eddie Knight IV.”

“Dude, nice. Who are your friends?” He comes closer to them, picking his way over rotting corpses.

Shitty introduces them as Nursey shakes hands. “That’s Lardo, she’s amazing. Ransom, from Toronto, Holster, who can’t navigate for shit.”

Nursey comes to a halt in front of Dex, nearly pressed right up against him. Too close. Nursey half-smiles, and Dex is somewhat overwhelmed. “And you are?” They shake hands, awkwardly leaning back to accommodate the lack of space between them. Dex is pretty sure that Nursey looks at his mouth for a moment, but can’t be positive. They’re exactly the same height and Nursey’s hand is large and calloused and warm. Shitty’s voice introducing Dex and the rattle and screech of the train sound distant, muffled by the dull roar coming up in Dex’s ears.

Nursey raises his eyebrows, smirk becoming more pronounced. “You know how to handle a power tool, I see?”

Dex licks his lips, nearly cross-eyed trying to keep Nursey in focus. “Uh, yeah. What are you good for?”

“I prefer hand-to-hand, but I’m open to bringing something else in to get the job done.” Nursey, Dex swears to god, bites his lip and the whole world stops turning.

Shitty claps his hands. “So you’re good to fight, then?” he asks.

Nursey scans Dex’s face. “Yeah, yeah I can do that, if you’ve got room.”

Holster barks out a laugh. “Shit, bro, we’ve got nothing _but_ room.” He shakes the gore from the end of his baseball bat and tucks it back into the trombone case, snapping the latches shut. “You need a bag, though. Clothes ‘n shit. How do you know Shitty?”

Nursey swings around one of the poles, stretching to step over zombies. “We went to high school together in Andover.”

 

 

They’re on the bus after stopping by Nursey’s moms’ townhouse when Dex asks, “Wait, your name’s not Nursey, is it?”

Nursey cocks his head. “No. Derek Nurse.” Dex makes a thoughtful noise. “Uh, you’re Dex?”

“William. I don’t really get these guys’ obsession with not calling people by their given names. They’re cool, though. Good in a fight.”

“How long have you been doing this? Going around and fighting zombies?” Nursey asks, dragging a crate up the bus so he can sit next to Dex in the driver’s seat.

“For me? About a week. These guys have been on it longer. I think Ransom and Holster started three weeks ago? Maybe less,” Dex says distractedly, checking his mirrors.

“And you just go town to town and kill the zombies you come across.”

Dex gives a half-shrug. “Yeah. I mean, we can and Shitty’s got his dad’s quote-unquote funding, so why shouldn’t we make things easier for other people and piss around killing zombies? Plus, these guys needed help before I came along.”

Nursey _hms_ in thought. “You’re from up north?” he guesses.

“Yeah,” Dex smiles at the memory of home. “Southeast Maine. On one of the islands.” It doesn’t feel like an island, with all the woods and fields, but Dex grew up begging rides to friends’ houses because the bridges weren’t safe for bikes.

* * *

 

Dex’s cell phone rings. Nursey puts it on speaker for him.

“Dex! It’s Holster.”

Dex doesn’t bother rolling his eyes. “Hi. What’s up?”

“My mom called and said I need to bring back the car. Can we swing by Buffalo?”

Dex glances at Nursey, who’s already digging behind the armchair/driver’s seat for the atlas. “We can make that work. I’m thinking another hour before a rest stop. How you doing on gas?”

 

 

They’d been heading west, so they loop through Philly. Nursey physically can’t seem to shut up about a tiny hipster donut shop in downtown that’s only open on like full moons or some shit, so Dex grudgingly navigates a fucking school bus through the city. Traffic is at a standstill a couple blocks from the mystery bullshit donut place, so they send Nursey on his own to get a couple dozen for the lot of them while they wait.

Nursey comes back after half an hour, the line of cars and buses not having moved a single inch, bearing a box of ridiculous pastries. “There’s a commotion a block or so that way,” he points, “and we’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Dex and Holster park right where they are, and after all the donuts are gone (an appalling seven minutes), they decide that rubbernecking will be more fun than roasting in the unmoving bus.

The commotion is concentrated in an open square with some kind of monument pillar in it, but the column is mostly obscured by the horde of people and undead clogged around it. Their attention is drawn to a figure atop a yellow taxi, systematically swinging at zombies with two long, heavy-looking chains.

They do nothing but seek cover at that point, having left their weapons on the bus and still digesting the donuts. The man on the taxi appears to have things under control; he’s wiping out Affected at twice the rate as the few people on the ground. It’s a terse ten minutes, however, and Holster has to talk Ransom down twice from collecting their weapons and helping out anyway.

Lardo and Dex have their little conference in that ten minutes.

“We should ask him if he wants to join us. We have the space. He’s obviously a good resource,” Lardo mutters.

Shitty overhears and sidles in. “Do you want me to ask him?”

Dex and Lardo share a look. Really, neither of them is the approaching-strangers type, and it really is kind of Shitty to offer. Dex folds his arms and looks at his shoes, and Lardo nods. “Yeah. Don’t freak him out.”

Shitty power walks across the square, weaving through the still-stopped traffic and the dissipating crowd, stepping over dismembered undead. The group watches him gently stop the man by the shoulder, and effusively introduce himself and explain their avowed purpose in ridding the eastern seaboard of Afflicted, or so they assume by his broad gestures and twitching mustache.

Shitty introduces them to Christopher Chow on the walk back to the bus. “Okay, this is Chris. Chris, this is the Zombie Murder Squad, patent pending. Go ahead and introduce yourself properly.”

Chris bounces on the balls of his feet, despite the obviously heavy chains draped over his shoulders and torso like bandoliers. “Yeah, I’m Chris. I’m from California but I’m just finishing up a visit to my family here in Philadelphia.”

Ransom wraps an arm around Chris’s shoulders and says to him seriously, “We’re keeping you.”

“I mean,” Shitty recovers, “only if you want to come with us.”

Chris beams. “Yeah! If I’m not imposing.” At their shaking heads, he continues. “My team back home disbanded and cancelled our season because of local outbreaks so I came here to see if I could help my family out with the undead problem. I was just going to leave for New York City today!”

They pile into the bus and get Chris settled. Holster tells him on his way to his own car, “Well, Buffalo isn’t the city but it’s something. Nursey could tell you all about NYC, if you want.”

Chris twists around to find Nurse. “Really? You’re from New York City? That’s so cool!”

His and Nursey’s conversation lulls into the background for a couple hours, trading stories from their respective coasts until Lardo chimes in after Chris’s fourth mention of a team. “What sport do you play?”

“Oh, I play hockey. I’m the backup goalie for the San Jose Barracuda! I’ve even gotten to play a couple games for the Sharks, too. They’re my favorite team.” Chris’s face lights up. “Do you guys like hockey?”

They—Shitty, Dex, Lardo, and Nursey—shake their heads no. Chris talks about hockey anyway for another hour, but his enthusiasm is so endearing that they can’t help listening to him.

 

 

Mrs. Birkholtz is happy to have her son back and Holster’s sisters are happy to have their car back. Mr. Birkholtz admires the renovated bus and grills dinner for the lot of them while Holster does load after load of laundry in a machine that doesn’t take quarters. Shitty and Nursey and Holster’s sisters get on like a house on fire, first talking a mile a minute in the living room and then moving out to the backyard where they and Dex teach Shitty and Nursey how to enjoy a real backyard. Chris and Lardo, along with Holster’s mother, do a quick but thorough scrub-down of the bus, inside and out.

Dinner is hot dogs, hamburgers, and summer veggies out on the back deck and is spent regaling the Birkholtzes with stories from their trip so far.

“Where to next?” Mr. Birkholtz asks Ransom.

Holster answers. “I was thinking just across the border for a bit, if everyone has their passports.”

“Oh,” then Mrs. Birkholtz’s face falls. “We thought you’d be staying.”

Ransom and Holster share guilty and nauseous looks. “Well…” Ransom hedges, “there’s still a lot we can do.” Holster shrinks further into his patio chair under his father’s gaze, a comical sight considering his frame.

Lardo gently clears her throat. “I mean, we’re not on any kind of schedule. We could stay overnight or for a couple of days, so you’ll have time to work this out.”

Holster’s parents nod and back off, but the tension doesn’t dissipate for the rest of the meal.

* * *

 

Dex drives the bus and all but Ransom and Holster to a nearby campsite for the night. Ransom loses to Halley at MarioKart while eavesdropping on Holster’s argument with his parents. It’s uncomfortable even just listening to it. At the end of it, almost midnight, he shoots Lardo a text: _full team departure tomorrow 10 am_

* * *

 

Mrs. Birkholtz’s goodbye the next morning is no less teary or heartfelt than the last. They don’t linger, opting instead to bug on out for a late breakfast and time on the road.

Holster stretches his legs across the bus, leaning back on the couch. “Where now?”

Behind the wheel, Dex shrugs. “I’ve been choosing roads at random.”

Nursey, playing on his phone, announces, “I have a friend in Montreal who says that they’ve barricaded the island from the inside and can’t ship resources in.

Shitty casts him a skeptical look. “A friend in Montreal?”

“Okay, someone I follow on tumblr,” Nursey admits. “That doesn’t diminish the fact that they’re a person who’s saying that lots of people are in trouble.”

Dex sighs. “Yeah, fine. Someone get me a map, I guess.”

 

 

The border crossing is abandoned, long-since by the dilapidated state of the booths. Lucky, too, considering they’re in an uninsured bus with outdated plates and an unlicensed driver and definitely loaded with weapons and Shitty’s no-so-secret stash of weed.

“Shit,” Dex says, pulling off to the side of the road. “I don’t speak French.”

No one pipes up with a coincidental knowledge of the local language—even Ransom explains, “I haven’t thought about French in like three years, bro, and even that was barely useful.” Lardo shakes Nursey, who is half-asleep on his bunk with his headphones in. “Nurse, no one speaks French.”

“No, I’m pretty sure like half a billion people do. And me. Whaddaya need?”

Dex’s ears redden. “I’m trying to drive to Montreal _for you_ and I don’t need pulled over.”

So Nursey perches at Dex’s shoulder and translated road signs into his ever-reddening ears.

* * *

 

About five kilometers out from the island, they encounter no traffic whatsoever, oncoming or otherwise.

“What’s that sign?” Dex asks of a message board blinking ‘ROUTE BARRÉE.’

“Um, I haven’t seen that one before, but you might want to pay attention to your lanes, I guess? One or two of them might be closed.”

The whole bridge is blocked off, indeed, right at the end of it, and a horde of one or two hundred undead are swarming at the gate.

Dex swears under his breath but Shitty offers no such courtesy.

“Holy _fuck!_ ”

They grab their weapons from the wardrobe and file out. Dex, with the keys, catches Nursey lingering. “Do you need something? You know where the weapons are.”

Nursey’s complexion has gone ashen. “I, um.” He gulps. “I don’t actually know how to fight.”

Dex makes a face. “Then what was that conversation on the subway?”

“I thought we were flirting! That was all innuendo!”

“You’re into me?” Dex knows, out of his body, that he needs to help kill some zombies, but Nursey is...being Nursey.

Nursey shrugs. “Well, yeah,” he says, like he really wants to say _duh_. “Don’t drag me for this, but I think it was mostly the chainsaw. Competency thing.”

Dex takes a deep breath. “Okay. You take the keys—” he sets them in Nursey’s hand, “—and stay with the bus, and I’m going to slaughter some Affected and then we are going to revisit this later.”

Dex steps off the bus and into the fray, and it gets messy fast. Someone on the island opens the blockade, presumably to help, but then strangers and civilians are intermingling with the zombies and no one really knows who needs to be killed (again). Ransom and Holster utilize their range as far as they can, carving a six-foot-wide path through the mess. Lardo is actually grunting from the exertion and speed with which she decapitates monster after monster. The living tend to stay out of Chris and Dex’s ways, avoiding the heavy swinging chains and certain death via chainsaw.

Nursey, bless his city-slicker heart, edges the bus through the opening in the gate, terror on his face behind the wheel. He makes it to the clearer side in one piece and manages to run over some undead on his way.

The fight shifts, then, in through the gate and it melds indistinguishably from the watching passersby. It dissipates after that, the living outnumbering the undead. One last Affected digs its fingernails into Dex’s shoulder, too close to get with the chainsaw. There’s a struggle, Dex grappling to pull away from the zombie, but parts of Affected litter the ground and he stumbles, allowing the monster to grip him tighter. The rest of the living are back at the bus or dispersed into the city, and for the first time since he’s left home, Dex feels cold fear slip down his spine.

Shitty’s sharpened sledgehammer smashes through the monster’s exposed skull, driving it to the ground and pulling Dex down a ways with it. He wrenches its brittle fingers from his shoulder and staggers upright with the help of...not Shitty’s outstretched hand.

Nursey smirks at him. “First casualty on our side,” he says, eyeballing the puncture wounds in Dex’s shoulder.

“Oh, right. Ow, shit,” Dex realizes. “You fought a zombie.” They start back to the bus.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t know how to fight.”

“First of all, I take offense to that; clearly I _do_ , and secondly, of course I would try for you.”

“That’s gross.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna kiss you anyway.”

“Yeah?”

Dex turns Nursey by his shoulder and grips the front of Nursey’s shirt. “Yeah,” he breathes, but it’s lost in between the press of Nursey’s lips and his own. And then he’s kissing Nursey and it’s soft and warm and a little salty from Dex’s sweat and it’s the best thing Nursey’s ever felt. Nursey’s hands move up to cradle Dex’s jaw and the back of his neck, changing the angle and deepening the kiss.

Dex pulls back and smiles bashfully, and Nursey can’t take his eyes off him.

Ransom, Lardo, and Holster catcall and wolf-whistle from the emergency door of the bus, while they can faintly hear Chris inside, pleading with them to leave Nursey and Dex alooooooone.

“So, are we, like, dating? Exclusive?” Dex asks in a low whisper, ignoring the busload of cavemen. He rests his forehead against Nursey’s.

“William Poindexter, are you DTR-ing here on a bridge in Montreal among the dismembered bodies of the undead? How romantic of you,” Nursey jokes. “Yes, please.”

“Ew, I’m breaking up with you right now immediately,” Dex teases back, then kisses Nursey again.

“Okay, we should clean up or something,” Nursey says, putting a stop to the kissing for a moment. He takes hold of Dex’s hand and they walk back to the bus, their weapons trailing on the ground.

Back at the bus, Nursey notices first. “Where’s Shitty?”

No one knows. They comb the bridge, dreading finding him among the decaying limbs. Thankfully, there’s no definitive evidence of him. Lardo suggests that maybe he fell in the river, and Holster hauls her around in a fireman’s carry as revenge.

“He’s not answering his phone,” reports Nursey, lowering his phone from his ear.

“It might not be charged?” suggests Ransom, while he kicks at zombie body parts for what appears to be the fun of it.

Lardo sighs from atop Holster’s shoulders. “Should we call it?”

Nursey opens his mouth, but Dex explains to him, “She means the search. She heard you the first time.”

Holster shrugs, jostling Lardo. “I guess. I mean, what else can we do at this point?” No one is happy about it, but he’s right. It’s a possibility they’ve collectively been ignoring till now, the chance of death or injury or zombification. To face it, acknowledge it this way, is a jarring and chilling slap from the more unfortunate aspects of their reality. In light of the reminder of the mortality of themselves and their loved ones, they mourn Shitty appropriately.

 

(They get drunk at a sports bar.)

Dex is stuck as the designated driver, if only because he’s last into the bar after locking up the bus. The six of them cram into a long booth and crowd the tabletop with fries and beers and shots. Dex nurses a Sprite.

The somber affair turns raucous somewhere between Holster’s fourth and fifth beers. Lardo (six drinks) methodically destroys each of them at darts while Nursey (three shots and half a beer) leans heavily on Dex and languidly mumbles into his shoulder. Dex puts on a surprisingly good poker face only betrayed by the redness of his ears and cheeks.

The doorbell chimes, announcing the entrance of another patron, and Chris’s ensuing gasp is so dramatic and overdrawn that it leaves him choking on air. Once he catches his breath, it takes him three tries to stammer out, “B-B-Bad Bob Zimmermann!”

Not one of the other five knows what’s happening, but Chris (two beers and sporting a mad flush), already excitable on the bleakest of days and stone-cold-sober, has alarming tears in his eyes. They twist around to see the man in question: middle-aged, handsome, and flanked on either side by a stunning blonde woman and another handsome man who is clearly a product of the former two. The trio is accompanied by none other than—

“SHITTY HOLY FUCK YOU WERE DEAD,” Holster booms, choking a little on the beer he’s trying to suck down while hollering across the bar.

Shitty, for it is none other than him, lights up and drags the younger of the male strangers to the table with him. The older ones follow, bemused.

“Holtzy, Rans, you’re not going to believe this. Sit the hell down and strap the fuck in because this is the goddamn wildest story you’re gonna hear this week.” Shitty drags over a pair of chairs for the end of the booth, and Big Blue-Eyes asks a table for another couple. Shitty seats himself theatrically, swinging a leg over and straddling the back of the chair. “I got lost in this _throng_ of people in the middle of the fight, dropped the sledgehammer because I could hurt someone and just kinda went with the flow, yaknow? Next this I know, this French-Canadian Adonis is bumping into me and not even apologizing like a real Canadian, so I _had_ to figure that the fuck out, right? So turns out Jacky-Boy here, Jack, Jacques, my main man, is a history major part-time and peewee hockey coach the other part of the time, and he knows playmaking and organization and leadership and also his dad played hockey for a while, I think?”

Chris is vibrating at this point, unable to decide whether to focus on Bad Bob Zimmermann or Jacky-Boy. Bob notices Chris’s poorly-contained excitement, asking, “You know hockey, son?”

“ _Do_ I! I played for the Sharks! I was their goalie! You’re Bad Bob Zimmermann! I’ve followed the Sharks my whole life but there’s not a hockey fan in the world who doesn’t know your name!”

Bob is obviously pleased about the hockey playing, if the deepening of his eye crinkles is anything to go by. “What’s your nickname?” he asks, taking Chris’s admiration in stride.

“They call me Chowder, which is weird, because it’s so hot in Cali—no one even eats soup all that often?”

Holster and Ransom gasp in unison. “Bro! You go by Chowder?” It’s frightening, really.

Lardo jumps in, setting aside the cup of water she’s been chugging. “You mind?” she asks Chris.

“No, yeah! You all have nicknames. And now I’ll feel like part of the team!” Chris—now Chowder—says, practically glowing.

Lardo feels a pang of guilt at that, that maybe Chowder hasn’t felt included. They’ve been falling together into this adventure, cobbled into some faux-found-family that chirps each other too much and collectively can’t seem to read a fucking atlas. She has a feeling that Jack will be a part of this, too, because Shitty’s acting with him the way he first treated her, in retrospect.

Ransom spills a beer across himself and Holster, and Lardo remembers that they don’t have access to showers tonight. Dex must realize this, too, from the way he eyeballs the spill and then makes resigned eye contact with Lardo. He looks to Jack’s mom, the only one not in conversation. “Do you know of any laundromats in the area? And does Canada have YMCAs?”

She chews on her bottom lip. “Not that I know of, for either. Bobby,” she rests her hand on her husband’s arm, “they’re welcome to stay the night, aren’t they?”

“Oh, of course! God knows we’ve got plenty of room.”

They fall over themselves “not wanting to intrude,” but the Zimmermanns insist, and it’s only when Jack says, “Yeah, I’m not going if you all smell bad,” that they stop on that vein and start on another.

Shitty shouts. Not loudly enough to involve or concern other patrons, but it’s definitely a shout. “You’ll actually do it!?” He throws himself onto Jack’s lap. “I thought you were humoring me!”

Jack’s parents look pleasantly surprised.

They call it a night at that point. Shitty (Shitty’s dad) picks up the tab, shouting down Bob’s offers.

Jack rides in the bus to direct Dex home; traffic on the island is still bad even at the late hour, so they try to take a back way so as not to navigate a stolen bus through downtown.

The Zimmermanns’ house is...large. Dex was concerned about the bunking situation, but there’s plenty of space for the extra seven of them. Dex may selfless, but even he is sick of the too-thin cot in his bunk. Of course he’d rather sleep on the plush, carpeted floor of a climate-controlled room than in the stale, buggy Haus whose floors are a little sticky.

Jack’s house is not sticky. Jack’s mom (whose name, Dex catches, is Alicia, and she looks vaguely familiar) hovers around the linen closet and sitting room, making sure that everyone knows where everything is. Dex gets to shower in a bathroom where he can go barefoot on the floor without worrying about ringworm. Nursey, and then Lardo, take turns in the giant bathtub in the guest bathroom.

The seven of them are camped all over the living room, Lardo and Ransom calling dibs on the couches, Holster in the recliner, and the other four lined up on the floor. Several minutes after lights-out, Holster whispers, “They’re all really good-looking, right? It’s not just my fundamental thirst?”

“Dudes,” Lardo says, “Alicia Zimmermann was part of my gay awakening when she was on that show on ABC.”

“Not to be tactless,” says Shitty carefully, “but you’re gay?”

“You’re good, bro, no worries,” Lardo assures him, “and I’m bi, actually.”

Holster, Nursey, and Ransom sit up.

“No shit, me too!” Holster and Ransom whisper-shout in unison (Holster more shouting than whispering, and Lardo shushes him). Nursey says, “I’m pan! Heck yeah polysexuality, am I right?”

“I’m just gay,” Dex adds, “Um. Obviously.”

Shitty jumps on that. “What do you mean, ‘obviously’? That kind of stereotyping is really damag—”

“Shitty, Jesus, he and Nursey like, made out while we all thought you were dead,” Chowder says. “Take a chill pill.”

“Awe! That’s a-fucking-dorable. Sorry I missed it. And sorry for jumping down your throat, Dex. And sorry for disappearing on you guys. I was gonna text but I don’t have an international plan.” Shitty actually sounds chagrined for worrying his friends.

“Hey, you disappeared and immediately found the richest and most handsome person in Montreal, which is no small feat,” Ransom points out. “Worst is you could’ve been dead for real.”

An uncomfortable silence falls over the room as they collectively contemplate their fragile mortality. Dex breaks it by yawning. “What did you say that Jack does?”

“He coaches peewee hockey. Fuckin’ cute as shit, innit? Must be better with kids than he is with adults, which means he’ll be fine around us.”

Holster rolls over on the recliner, causing it to creak jarringly. “You’d think he plays hockey himself, with how built he is, plus his dad probably would’ve taught it to him young.”

“He did play!” Chowder contributes. “He did juniors here in Quebec but he got hospitalized before the draft and never ended up playing professionally.”

“Wait, shit, I _did_ hear about that,” Ransom says. “It was all over sports news when it happened. Some kind of drug overdose or something. People tried to make it sound really bad, like theorizing about hard drugs.”

Shitty hums dubiously. “Yeah, I don’t think Jack is the kind of person ESPN wants him to be. You think a coke addict would be working closely with little kids?” Shitty sounds like he’s warning them. “I’m gonna give him the benefit of the doubt, and he doesn’t owe me an explanation.”

“I think that goes for all of us, Shits,” Lardo says. “Right, guys?”

 

 

Jack is handy to have on the bus. For one, he’s taking online classes toward a history degree, so he takes up next to no space—just enough for a laptop, a few books, a duffel of clothes, and his body. This also means that he reads a lot about wars, and the group discovers quickly that Jack is such a dweeb that he reads about specific battle strategy. Combined with his hockey playmaking—peewee level aside—he’s their new fighting strategist. He makes up a little playbook for them that covers different geographies and numbers, and it works for them.

Dex stops in rural western PA for several days to make sure everyone (Nursey) knows how to use their weapons (Nursey).

Jack goes on a pantry run in town while they practice and he comes back with Pop-Tarts, dried fruit, a tub of protein powder (just plain protein powder, not even something to mix it into), and a hatchet. He stashes the grocery bags and waits patiently for Dex to finish showing Nursey how to swing the sledgehammer, arms wrapped around him and whispering instructions (probably?) into Nursey’s ear. Dex doesn’t step too far away, instead electing to yell to Jack, “Pick a tree and figure it out.”

Jack nods and wanders a ways off, loosening his shoulders and testing the feel of the axe in his hands. The tree he ends up choosing is a black walnut about as big around as his thigh. He takes two practice swings through the air, taking note of the twist in his torso and the pull across his back.

Jack’s first chop at the tree is ineffectual, to put it kindly. The blade skids off the bark and skitters off to the side, wrenching the axe back and forth in Jack’s grip. Muttering curses, Jack shakes out his arms and shoulders and readjusts his grip and the angle. The second swing lands home, burying the blade deep in the tree. So deep, in fact, that he has to work to wrench it back out.

“What the FUCK,” Shitty shouts, loping toward Jack from the bus, half a Pop-Tart hanging out of his mouth, crumbs spraying everywhere. “That’s a living goddamn tree and you’re cutting its _heart_ out!”

“I’m practicing, Shitty,” Jack explains patiently, both feet braced on the trunk of the tree, axe still wedged in tight. “I’m not doing much damage.”

Shitty hugs the trunk of the tree, bringing him close enough to Jack now that Jack can smell the weed on him. “Pick a dead one.”

The axe comes loose and Jack falls on his spectacular ass. “Fine,” he pouts, brushing himself off, and he stalks off with a glower.

 

Lardo wanders over to the dead tree that Jack is hacking away at, and she quietly surveys him. When he takes a break to wipe the sweat off his forehead and roll the tightness out of his shoulders, she approaches him. Lardo rests a hand on his big forearm, leans in close, whispers “ _lumberjack_ ,” and walks away. Jack smiles as he watches her leave.

 

 

They head farther and farther south, through West Virginia and Virginia and a corner of Tennessee.

“Can we swing by Asheville?” Lardo asks one morning. “Buzzfeed says they have the best brunch in NC.”

“ _Fuck_ yes, brunch!” Ransom crows.

“What are grits?” Lardo asks, scrolling on her phone. “And are they good with shrimp?”

“Uh,” Dex calls back, “I think it’s corn-based, but like oatmeal. Like, instead of oats, it’s ground-up corn.”

Lardo narrows her eyes keenly, then shrugs. “Yeah, I want to try some.”

* * *

 

Half an hour before Asheville, Dex exits the highway to refill the gas tank. Clouds boil and darken overhead, and even though it’s the middle of the morning, the sky purples like a bruise.

While Dex pumps the gas, Lardo assembles her backpack and explains, “We passed a craft store up the road; I’m going to look for some fabric for the back of the armchair.”

Chowder sits up from his cot. “I’m coming too.”

The whole group, minus Dex and Jack, ends up traipsing to the craft store to stretch their legs and wreak general young man havoc.

Jack stays with the Haus, finishing up an essay due the next day while Dex catches up to the others. The skies open up a few minutes later, heavy rain falling in sheets and echoing a cacophony through the Haus. The Haus darkens to the point that Jack can’t read his textbook anymore, so he huffs out a sigh and saves his document, gently closing the laptop and leaning back on the couch.

Rain splashes through a window, and when Jack gets up to close it, he notices a crowd of undead shuffling up the main road of the little town. He sighs again, grabs a ball cap, and fetches his axe from the cupboard.

It’s a mess outside. The sidewalk is flooded, mud oozes everywhere, and Jack is soaked to the skin within seconds. The wind whips around him, stinging his face as he creeps up on the Affected.

* * *

 

“Awe, damn,” Shitty whines. The group crams into the narrow entryway, clad in tank tops and t-shirts and shorts. Lardo clutches a roll of fabric too bulky to fit into her bookbag.

“Do we make a run for it?” Holster asks.

Ransom examines the sky and horizon. “It shouldn’t last long. Maybe half an hour?”

“We can wait that out,” Lardo says decisively.

Chowder’s stomach gurgles. All eyes turn to him. “I can wait!” he says. “Hockey player metabolism.”

“Oh, fucking hell,” Shitty groans.

The horde of Affected pushes like a tsunami up the main road, with little hindrance from anything but the rain. They’re stuck, unarmed, without any way back to their weapons. In the pouring rain. The group presses up against the doors to watch.

“Hang on,” Ransom says, pushing his nose to the glass, “is that—”

* * *

 

Jack methodically swings at neck after neck—sometimes a chest—felling undead left and right. Rain sluices off his hat, occasionally impairing his vision, but in the middle of the road there’s little for him to hit besides zombie.

It takes ten minutes or so, but the zombies finally start to notice the living man in their midst. They swarm him, slow but single-minded. Jack chops more desperately, making sure to keep moving. The rain on him renders their grabs at him futile, dull and deadened fingers slipping off his skin.

He manages another few minutes, but the Affected press too close for him to use his axe. Jack, frantic now, scans the area for an escape route. The horde presses close and dense, without any thinning to the crowd where he could even hope to push through, but his gaze does land on a small, glowing red dot on one zombie’s forehead, and Jack has seen enough police procedurals to know to get out of the way.

He drops into a squat and covers his head just in time before a bang sounds out and a monster falls into the one next to it. Four _bangs_ later, six zombies litter the ground and the swarm has thinned enough to be manageable.

Jack leaps back and up and swings with frenzy, the rain letting up a bit and the zombies now confused.

Another bang, and something goes past Jack’s ear so fast and close he can hear the whistle of it. « Crisse d’ostie ! » he spits through his teeth, as the head of the zombie beside him explodes and the body collapses. Periodic shots ring out after that, thankfully no more as close as that one.

The Affected are short work once Jack and the shooter work in tandem. The rain miraculously stops as the last monster falls from a blow from Jack, and the sun beats down over the scene.

“Brah!” Shitty yells from up the road. “Holy fuckin’ god, I thought you were gonna die for sure,” The group runs to Jack, and Shitty gets there first and envelops him in a hug despite the sweat, rain, and gore.

“Why did none of you tell me you had a gun with you?” Jack asks breathlessly, either from exertion or from Shitty’s strangling hug.

“Uh, yeah, about that,” Lardo says. “We don’t.”

“Then who was that? Some stranger was shooting—” Jack breaks off and goes pale, remembering the projectile that had just missed him. The adrenaline is fading from his system, replacing itself with retrospective fear and anger. “They could have killed me,” Jack states with a frown.

“Could have, but I didn’t,” a voice drawls from across the road from the fabric store. A young man, the obvious source of the voice, stands there, wearing a windbreaker and shorts, and holding, really, an unreasonably large shotgun.

“And how could I have known that?” Jack gripes around Shitty’s head.

The man hops off the curb. “You just had to trust me. Didn’t look like you had many options at that point.”

Jack is not familiar with this man’s accent and he is sweaty and hungry and cranky and he’s just been shot at, so frankly he’s not in the mood to be overly grateful to the stranger who shot a gun past his head. “Shooting at my head was your way of getting me to trust you?”

“The sharpest shooting in Morgan county three years running was my way of getting you to trust me,” the man corrects Jack. “Y’all are from out of town?” he asks the group at large. They roll call their names, homes, pronouns, and weapons of choice.

“Nursey, he/him, NYC, and Lardo lets me borrow a knife sometimes but Dex is teaching me pretty much all of them.” He hip-checks Dex and smiles at him. Jack doesn’t miss the way the new man’s eyes narrow.

“Yeah, I’m Dex. Uh, he/him, Edgeport, Maine, and I’ve got a chainsaw back on the bus.”

“Hell yeah, you do, babe,” Nursey teases lowly, grabbing Dex’s hand and leaning up against him.

Jack watches the new guy’s eyes widen this time.

“Guys, back off on the PDA, for our sakes,” Lardo chastises. Nursey moves half a step away but leaves their hands clasped.

“Anyway,” Chowder says, “I’m Chowder. San Francisco, he/him. I kill zombies with chains. It’s rad as shit.”

“That _sounds_ rad as shit,” New Guy says with a genuine smile. “I’m Eric Bittle. Um, he/him? And I’m from Madison, Georgia. Oh, and I shoot zombies, pretty much. I have a knife, but I don’t like using it. Sorry,” he says to Jack, “I interrupted. What’s your name?”

Jack says, “Jack. He/him. Montréal, Canada. Just, euh, this axe. To kill zombies.”

“You’re very good at it, Jack. I didn’t mean to offend or spook you earlier—I just didn’t want to see anyone lost to something when I knew I could help.” Eric worries his lip between his teeth. “So y’all go around and kill these things?” he asks, indicating the zombies by kicking one.

“Yeah, we’ve got a bus that Dex renovated so we can live in it,” Lardo explains with pride. She holds out the bolt of fabric. “This is the final touch.”

Eric’s eyes barely leave Nursey and Dex, even though he’s obviously trying to look like he isn’t watching them. “Would y’all have room if I asked to go with you?” He looks so nervous that Jack almost answers.

Shitty does instead. “Hell yeah, brah. We’ve got one more bed available.”

“You’re sure? Really? I don’t want to be an imposition…” Eric’s gaze darts all over them, looking for the slightest hint of doubt.

Jack figures he should speak up. “Yeah! Uh, no?” Eric’s face falls. Jack scrambles to recover. “Come with us. You’re clearly good at what you do and you won’t be in the way.” Jack knows he hasn’t come across as the good-natured, teasing type, so he refrains from commenting on how little space Eric would indeed occupy.

Jack’s rudeness accommodated, Eric lights up. “Oh, thank y’all so much! I just need to run back in and get my backpack and that’ll be all.” He turns tail into the abandoned storefront from which he had emerged.

“I’m charmed,” Shitty says.

“I’ve just met him, but I will protect him with my life,” declares Lardo.

“He’s so small?” Holster says, turning to Ransom. “I know I’m big, but he’s small, right?”

“What did he say his name was? I missed it,” Chowder asks.

“Eric Bittle,” answers Ransom.

“Holy shit, we _have_ to call him Bitty,” Shitty says.

Nursey shifts on his feet. “We should make sure he’s okay with that and knows we’re not making fun of him.”

“Oh shit, yeah, of course,” Holster says.

Eric reemerges from the building laden with a camper’s backpack, strapped onto which are two rifles and a cast-iron skillet. Two holsters have been strapped around Eric’s thighs as well, the right with a handgun and the left with an eight-inch kitchen knife. “All right, this is everything! Ready to head out?” he says cheerfully.

“Yep. C’mon.” With a jerk of the head, Jack leads the way back to the Haus. Eric walks alongside Lardo, effects jangling with each step.

“Oh! Eric.” Holster catches up to him. “Since we all have nicknames, except for Jack, can we call you Bitty? Since your last name is Bittle?”

Eric cocks his head, peering at Holster and giving it a thought. After some deliberation, he grins. “Yeah, sure! Thanks for asking; that was real nice of you.”

Shitty laughs. “Brah, that’s like, basic friendship.”

Bitty smiles, pleased.

“Question, though, Bitty,” Ransom calls up. “You really, uh, use all those guns?”

“Oh, yeah,” Bitty says, blasé. “I’ve been mostly hunting and living off the land since I left, so I can save my money for soap and laundry.”

“And you’re safe with them?” Ransom asks. “Not to sound skeptical, but I’m Canadian.”

“Of course I’m safe with them! They’re registered to me and I’m licensed for them and I always keep them unloaded and with the safety on when they’re not in use. I’m not very comfortable in close combat, so it’s just as well that I can get rid of Affected in the way I’m most useful.”

“So, it’s like, totally legal, except for zombies aren’t in season,” Holster jokes.

“Another question,” Ransom says, “what’s with the skillet?”

“You don’t expect me to eat _raw_ squirrel, do you?” Bitty says with a grin. “I may be a country bumpkin but I’m no savage.” He stops beside the Haus and gawks up at it. “Y’all live on _here_?”

Jack unlocks the doors and waves him in.

“Oh, gracious,” Bitty says in awe, jaw dropping at the poorly-decorated but still furnished interior. “Dex did this?”

“Bro, give us some credit, we all helped,” Lardo says. “And once we patch up the chair, we’re all set to go to brunch.”

“Heh, gay brunch,” Nursey mutters to Dex. Dex gives him a heatless glower, and Bitty can’t seem to help giving the two of them a sharp glance.

Holster claps his hands and rubs them together. “Gay brunch!”

 

 

“Shits, can I talk to you?” Jack asks when they let off in Asheville. Dex tosses Jack the keys on his way off the bus.

“What is up, my dude?” Shitty says, with sincere concern.

“Bittle’s...have you noticed anything weird?”

“Besides the guns and having the stature of a high school freshman? And being cute as a fucking button? Nah, brah, he’s great,” Shitty says. “Why, have you?”

“He keeps looking at Nurse and Dex and I know he’s from the South...and I don’t want to...imply? That he’s anything, uh, bad, but I think we should keep an eye out so Nurse and Dex don’t, um, aren’t uncomfortable.” Jack wallows in his mouth a bit. “I would talk to him myself, but—”

“Yeah, you made a terrible first impression, my guy,” Shitty finishes. “Sure, I’ll talk to him.”

* * *

 

“Bitty! Bits, Bittle-dee-dee, mind having a word?” Shitty asks when he comes back from the restroom.

Bitty hesitates. “Okay.” He stands from the booth and follows Shitty outside. “Is everything all right?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Shitty says vaguely. “I wanna sound as non-confrontational as possible when I ask you what the fuck is up with the hairy eyeball you keep giving Nursey and Dex.”

Bitty turns red. “Oh!” he squeaks. “That’s, um. That’s nothing. I’m not eyeballing. Nothing hairy. Just getting to know everyone,” he says sunnily, forcing a smile and still blushing furiously.

“Cuz I’ll have you know that I’m not putting up with any homophobia in our little troupe.” His hackles raise. “If you can’t deal with Nursey and Dex’s relationship, then you can bug the fuck off and not subject them to your close-minded, bass-ackwards,” Shitty pauses for breath and is cut off by Bitty’s shout.

“Shitty! That’s not it at all! Shitty, listen to me, please.” Bitty’s chest heaves and his eyes go a little wild. “Shitty.”

“Yes, Bitty?” He’s treading carefully now.

“First of all, our nicknames rhyme and that’s silly but I don’t think there’s anything to be done about that.” He takes a deep breath. “Secondly, I’m not...I don’t have a problem with Nursey and Dex’s relationship. I wasn’t watching them because it...because I think it’s wrong.” He breathes again. “I was watching them because...well, because _I’m_ gay. Too. And I’ve never...never seen any gay...any out people in real life. I’m. I mean, I’ve never even _told_ anyone before, that…” He trails off, a panicked look on his face. “Please don’t kick me out,” Bitty begs, looking Shitty right in the eye.

“Shit, bro, we’re not going to—holy shit, did you really think we’d—” Shitty runs his hands through his hair. “Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me that. And of _course_ we wouldn’t kick you out, what kind of—” Shitty catches sight of Bitty’s trembling bottom lip. “Oh, Bits.”

Shitty gathers him into a hug as Bitty’s breathing picks up. Gradually, Bitty starts to gasp for air, the trembling of his bottom lip moving to the entire rest of his body.

“Shitty,” he gasps, “I think this is a panic attack.”

“Okay, yeah,” Shitty says into Bitty’s hair. “What do you need?”

“Um? I don’t know!” Bitty says hysterically.

Shitty makes soothing noises and texts Jack. A few moments later, Jack comes from the restaurant quickly, worry etched across his face.

“What’s wrong?” he asks with the resident frown.

“Can you help Bitty?” Shitty asks, pulling away from a still-shaking Bitty. “I haven’t dealt with a panic attack before.”

Jack wipes his palms on his thighs, bobs his head, and sits next to Bitty at the picnic table. “Is it okay if I talk to you?”

Bitty nods.

“Okay. Do you want a hug?”

He shakes his head.

“Can I rest my hand on your back?”

It takes a moment, but Bitty shakes his head again.

“I’m going to ask you some questions. Is that okay? And you don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to.”

_Nod._

“Have you had a panic attack before?”

_Nod._

“Was it similar circumstances to what started this one?”

_Half-nod, half-shrug._

“Is it okay if Shitty tells me what was going on when this started?”

He hesitates again, but nods this time, firmly.

Jack looks to Shitty.

“He wasn’t looking at Nursey and Dex because of homophobia. Well, not because he’s homophobic.” Shitty gives Jack a meaningful look.

Jack understands. “Bittle? Bitty. How old are you?”

This, of all things, brings Bitty the closest to calm. “I’m twenty-one years old. I can’t help that I’m short!”

“How long have you been aware that you’re not...straight?” Jack looks to Shitty helplessly.

Bitty shudders out a long sigh. “Since elementary school? I didn’t, like, know what it was called or anything for a few years, but I only ever liked boys.”

“And Jack and I are the only people you’ve told?” Shitty asks incredulously. “Bits, it’s been like an hour.”

“I _told_ you,” Bitty says, wiping at his eyes, “I’d never _met_ , not even _seen_ gay people out and their friends treating them like they were _normal_.” He sniffles and hiccups. “Hearing you defend Nursey and Dex so passionately was entirely new to me, and I just—if not now, I mean, when? You know?”

“Oh my god,” Shitty says, “I in no way meant to make you feel pressured to come out, Bitty. That has to be 100-percent on your own terms.” He starts babbling about autonomy and the right to privacy and agency and Bitty cuts him off again, laughing this time.

“Shitty, it’s okay! You didn’t pressure me to come out. It was like you...lifted the pressure to stay in.”

“We won’t tell anyone, Bittle,” Jack promises. “You trusted us and we won’t betray that.”

“Oh, Jack,” Bitty sniffles, wrapping his arms tight around himself. “That’s so sweet of you. But I think...I think I’m okay with y’all knowing. It’d make it easier, I think.”

Jack nods stiffly, trying and kind of failing to look sympathetic. Shitty picks up the talking. “They’re a good group, Bitty. You’ll like them a lot.”

“I’m going to go finish eating,” Jack mumbles, and leaves.

“Yeah, we can head back,” Bitty says thickly and with a shallow laugh, wiping his hand over his face. “I’ve had enough emotion today.”

 

 

Bitty naps on the bus as it heads west. All Holster wants to see is the world’s biggest ball of twine, which Ransom calls “the epitome of white culture.”

It’s halfway through Tennessee when Jack asks, “Do people typically crowd around the doors of Wal-Marts?”

Holster snorts. “Chyeah. They call it Hell-Mart for a reason, my man.”

“It wasn’t, euh, its lights weren’t on.”

Dex whips the bus into a tight and super illegal U-turn and Ransom shrieks.

Holster explains. “Wal-Mart’s always open in the daytime. People should not be crowding at its doors,” he says to Jack.

“Oh, today isn’t some American holiday?”

“No holidays in August, bro,” Shitty grits out, clutching one of the bed frames while Dex fishtails into the parking lot, which is full of parked, dusty cars.

“Load up!” Jack calls when Dex parks by the mobbed entrance. “Lardo, Holster, Nursey, Chowder—you take the left entrance. We’ll meet in the middle.”

Bitty hangs back, awaiting particular instruction from Jack, since the others seem to know where to go.

“Bittle, stick to my left. We’re going to clear it all before we try to get inside.” Jack rolls the axe handle in his grip. “Watch out for the backswing,” he warns before diving into the fray.

Bitty’s veins run ice-cold at the sight of the swarm of angry, hungry undead. He trips over debris that litters the ground: chunks and parts of what must have been zombies that were turned upon when their fellows got hungry or bloodthirsty enough. An Affected swipes at Bitty and he dodges and winces.

A gun will do no good in these close quarters, and even if he stood back or climbed onto the bus, his friends still fight interspersed through the crowd, moving and too numerous to shoot around. Hysterically, he thinks, “too many cooks in the kitchen.” He draws his kitchen knife and readies his stance.

Bitty gets four good slashes in at two different Affected before another lunges at him and clips his shoulder. Before he realizes he’s moving, Bitty ends up crouched on the ground, arms over his head and world going swiftly black.

* * *

 

“Bitty, you gotta move or something, man.”

“Bitty. Bitty! Bittle! Does anyone remember his first name?”

“Uh, Evan? Aaron? Isaac? It started with a vowel.”

Something squishes Bitty’s cheeks, waking him up to too-bright midday sun and pebbles digging into his side. He tries to cough, but as the world swims back into focus, Ransom’s hand is still pinching his face and he’s surveying Bitty for open wounds.

“Bitty, holy shit, are you okay?” Shitty leans so far over bitty’s face that his hair tickles Bitty’s nose.

“Yeah, Shitty, I’m fine,” Bitty says, sitting up and brushing himself off. “It just got a little close, is all.”

“Well, you look okay,” Ransom says. “Just. Try not to spook us like that again, eh?”

“I won’t,” Bitty lies.

Ransom helps Bitty to his feet and Bitty straightens his clothes.

Jack and Lardo stand nearest to the doors, discussing something quietly. After a minute of their deliberation and Bitty’s explaining, “My name is Eric, how could you _all_ forget,” and Holster’s booming, “I WAS SO CLOSE,” Jack announces to the group, “We’re going in. Keep your weapons at the ready and don’t go anywhere without someone else.”

Chowder sidles up to Bitty. “Wanna be my recon buddy?”

The automatic doors are locked, so Jack and Shitty take their axe and sledgehammer to the glass with a little too much glee, on Shitty’s part at least. “Take _that_ , capitalist scum!”

The first thing they notice upon entering the Wal-Mart is that it smells _terrible_ . God-awful, stomach-turning, dead-thing-at-the-bottom-of-a-Mississippi-well _nasty_. Holster gags and covers his nose.

They don’t need to scope out the store. A good seventy or so people, healthy, living people, mill around the front of the building, some kids playing games and the adults cleaning the floors and registers.

Jack takes point on this one. “Uh, hello?”

A small, gray-haired lady pops up from behind one of the displays. “Oh, hi there! Can we help you?”

Jack concedes the lead. Shitty steps forward and says, “Yeah, uh, we just killed a bunch of zombies out front. Are you guys okay in here?” He looks around inquisitively.

“We’re just swell, thank you! Those Affected sure were pesky, weren’t they, Linda?” She looks over her shoulder.

Another woman looks up from where she’s scrubbing the conveyor belt. “Jiminy Christmas, were those Affected bothersome! Thank you kindly for getting rid of them for us.” She grins toothily at them and goes back to scrubbing.

Holster claps his hands. “Well, if that’s all—”

“Nonsense, no,” interjects the gray-haired woman. “We’ve gotta thank you properly for helping us out. Is there anything y’all need that we can set you up with?”

Lardo reaches into her pocket. “I did have a grocery list written up for sometime later this week, but if you’re allowed to—”

“Sure!” Gray-haired lady snatches the slip of paper from Lardo’s hand. “We’ve gone off the grid since the Affected shut us in, so we can give you whatever we’ve got in stock free of charge. I’m Patty O’Dell and I’m the manager here.” Patty snags two carts and leads the group of them through the pantry aisles. “The Affected showed up about a month ago, and we’ve been locked in ever since. Most of us were on our way out of town, seeing as the undead were sweeping through and wrecking everything they could find. Why, even Horace Meyer was up and about, and he hasn’t left the house since the drought of ‘03! Ol’ Agnes Keffer up on the hill was madder’n a hornet when they got into her bean patch, and her orchard was destroyed, too. What a shame, since her peaches are some of the best in the county.” Patty prattles on and fills the carts with ramen and boxed mashed potatoes and toilet paper, things that they need and that will last on the bus.

Chowder turns to Bitty. “Aren’t the best peaches fr—” he asks, but Bitty isn’t there. “Uh-oh.”

No one else notices Bitty’s absence till they reach the front of the store and start unloading the carts. Just as Chowder is starting to say, “I haven't seen him since the pasta aisle,” Bitty appears from the wayback of the store, pushing one cart full of flour and butter and real groceries and pulling one with a mini fridge in it.

Jack starts to ask him what the food is all for and where it will all go, but he cuts

off and shakes his head. Bitty loads the fridge onto the bus and somehow fits all the groceries into it, even though physically they should not be able to take up so little space. No one questions it.

“Thank you so much for the supplies,” Jack tells Patty. “Is there any way we can pay you?”

Patty shakes her head. “No worries, hun. Now that those Affected are gone, we should be just fine. You’ve already done plenty. Drive safe and don't hesitate to come visit if you're in town.” She has to reach up to pat his cheek.

 

 

“Bittle, do you have a minute?” Jack asks on the highway to Kansas.

Bitty stretches and sits up from his bunk. “I got nothing but time, Jack. What do you need?”

Jack frowns. “Do you not fight in close combat at all? You went down pretty fast back there.”

“Oh, that’s nothing!” Bitty says, blushing and looking anywhere but at Jack. “I just got nervous or something.”

Jack frowns with more intent. “If you say so.”

* * *

 

That evening, Bitty builds a campfire in the woods and makes a pizza in his skillet. The boys and Lardo sing praises through half-chewed slices, and Bitty establishes himself as the best cook they’ve got. It takes two days for Jack to agree, once Bitty fries two dozen chicken tenders over the campfire and bakes a crock of macaroni and cheese in the coals.

Jack wakes Bitty up at dawn. “Bittle. Get some shoes on.”

He doesn't bother even opening his eyes. “No,” Bitty says, rolling away from him.

“I'll toss the fridge.”

Bitty’s eyes snap open. “I'm up.”

They train every morning, Jack showing him punches to throw and dodges to make, and how to hold the knife so he can punch and cut at the same time. Bitty does well, mirroring his movements exactly, until the fourth day when Jack suggests sparring. Three pulled punches in, Bitty is crouched on his knees, arms over his head. Jack pulls him up, makes sure Bitty is unharmed, and they start again. This time, Bitty faints.

“Bittle, wake up.” Jack feels for Bitty’s pulse and checks his vision once Bitty regains consciousness. “Why does this happen?”

Bitty rolls onto his front. “Bad middle school experiences.”

Jack grips Bitty’s shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Bitty sits up. “I want to ignore it forever.”

Jack raises his eyebrows. “You're in the wrong business to be ignoring trauma, bud.”

“I don’t know if you realize, Jack, but most of my childhood was spent ignoring the bad stuff.” Bitty stands and brushes dirt and debris from himself. “My parents didn’t mention my baking and love for Beyoncé, and I didn’t mention my love for boys or the fact that more boys beat me than liked me.”

“Bittle—” Jack’s eyes look sad. No, worse: pitying. Bitty will do anything to wipe that look from his face.

“Nope! So, yeah, I have a mountain of issues about physicality, and also with talking about it, so we’re not gonna. Got that?” He rolls his shoulders. “Let’s go again,” he insists, rocking into a stance for throwing punches.

“This is not the time to be dismissive, Bittle,” Jack says, crossing his arms. “If you can’t get over your trauma enough to spar with someone who won’t hurt you, how can you last in a fight?”

Bitty scowls. He wants to be anywhere but here, doing anything but talking about his mental block. “Don’t worry. I know you won’t hurt me. Go for it, c’mon.”

Jack frowns, swings, and Bitty’s vision goes black.

* * *

 

He wakes up on the ground again, unhurt except for the twig poking into his back. Jack leans over him, a grimly satisfied expression on his face.

“That’s not fair!” Bitty protests. “I wasn’t ready.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. “Undead don’t fight fair. I didn’t even hit you.”

“Well, I thought—” Bitty stands up. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Stop lying, Bittle!” Jack goes to hold him by the shoulders, but stops himself and stands back. “How have you made it this far? How did you make it to us on your own?”

Bitty shrugs. “I had my guns. I didn’t have to get up close to anything. I still have my guns.”

“That’s not an option for you, because the rest of us will be fighting close up.” Jack crosses his arms and frowns.

“We could work something out?” Bitty suggests. “I could stay with the Haus or come in as a last resort or something.”

Jack mulls that over. It’s better than picking Bittle from the ground in every fight and having to worry about his safety or tripping over him. “We’ll stick with that for now, but it would help a lot if you could fight with us.” Jack nods. “How about you and I spar every morning until you can make it through a fight?”

Bitty shifts on his feet, but he knows it’s the fairest offer he could get. “Yeah, okay. What should I do for breakfast?”

Jack smiles with too many teeth. “Nothing, yet. C’mon, I bet you can’t hit me.”

* * *

 

The Affected get fewer and farther between as the Haus heads west. They loop down and around in the middle of Kansas—it’s getting cold up north now, and Bitty bemoans the “frigid September winds.” They have better luck finding undead when there are more people around, so Ransom suggests swinging through Dallas.

The city is bustling, even with the weird fear of Affected coursing underneath the day-to-day energy. Sidewalks have odd steps up or down, but it seems that the obstacles trip up more normal businessmen on their lunch hour than undead on their slow, shuffling search for a meal.

Life goes on around the zombie plague. Shitty catches sight of a poster advertising a concert at a local park, and he talks about it enough that they decide it can’t hurt to go.

They walk along the river, chatting and joking about the possibility of coming across a zombie while unarmed, when Chowder slows to a halt at the front of the group. “Parser?”

A blond figure blocks the sidewalk. It gazes across the river, not moving quite enough to be normal. At Chowder’s exclamation, it turns its head somewhat robotically, looking at the group but more past them or through them, not registering the handful of people staring at it. It smiles vaguely.

“Hey, Chowder?” Dex asks. “Who’s your friend?”

The figure doesn’t give him time to answer. “Zimms,” it says, its smile stretching too far, pulling its lips apart at the center. Its teeth are rotted and crooked, tilting like old, crumbling tombstones in its mouth.

Jack spits something that sounds vaguely French under his breath, and Bitty, even at the back of the group, can tell it wasn’t something polite. “Kenny.”

Shitty whips around to face Jack. “You know this guy?”

Jack purses his lips, not answering.

“Yeah, um, that’s Kent Parson, captain of the Las Vegas Aces,” Chowder explains. “Or, I guess, former captain.”

“How you doing, Zimms?” Kent asks slowly, slurring the words. It sounds more like “Ow oo dwin,” but there’s enough to parse out the meaning.

Jack frowns, and somehow Bitty can feel the rage coming off him in waves. “You look sprightly for being technically dead.”

Without missing a beat, Kent spits back (along with a tooth), “You didn’t.”

Jack, who had been standing with his hackles raised, flinches back ever so slightly. Shitty claps his hands, trying to diffuse the tension, and says too loudly, “O-kay! We’re just going to, um. We’ve got a thing to get to, Mister, uh, Parson, so we’ll just be on our way and. Yeah.” He ushers the group around Kent and has to lead Jack away with a hand at the center of his back.

It takes Chowder three beers and twenty minutes to fill Bitty in. Bitty didn’t even have to ask directly.

“So that’s Kent Parson, right? And Jack used to play hockey? So they did juniors together—that’s like little league baseball or something but it’s hockey and basically professional—and they were the best. They were like. Um, like. Seguin and Benn. Jamie Benn, because there’s two. Not Jordie Benn. Seguin and Jamie Benn. No-look, one-timers all over the place. A goalie’s nightmare.” Chowder takes a swig of his beer, dribbling a little over his upper lip. “Yeah, so, they were legends in the league and everyone was talking about who would go first in the draft, since that’s a big deal and they were both _so_ good. Anyway, Jack never made it to the draft. He was hospip-, hopsi-, hos-pi-tal-ized like the day before the draft and Parse ended up going first to Vegas. And Jack basically disappeared from hockey and Parse has ranked on basically every record he can.”

Bitty furrows his brows. “Thanks, Chowder.”

“No problem, Bitty! Love you!” Chowder turns back to face the stage and wedges his way in between Nursey and Dex, slinging an arm around each of them.

Bitty finds Jack and Lardo on a blanket at the back of the crowd, passing a beer between them. “Can I sit?”

Lardo scoots over, says “Sure, brah,” and pats the space next to her on the blanket. “Beer?” She tips the bottle towards him.

“Yeah, thanks,” Bitty says, taking a swig. “Y’all thinking of heading out soon?”

Jack nods. “It’s getting late.”

It _is_ creeping up on nighttime proper, rather than just late evening, and the atmosphere has slowly shifted from fun and carefree late summer to the humming tension of the fear of the undead that might lurk in the park. A shiver slides down Bitty’s spine. “It’s like you can almost feel ‘em, huh?”

Neither Jack nor Lardo answers, and they all fall into silence, which does nothing to assuage Bitty’s heebie-jeebies. He takes to tapping his fingers on the blanket to focus on something else, and moments later Jack stands and announces, “I’m going to round them up so we can go,” as if he noticed.

Bitty efficiently folds the blanket, driven by fear-fueled adrenaline. Lardo cuts him a questioning look. “I’m getting antsy; I don’t know what it is.”

They meet up back the way they came in, chattering away about the concert. Bitty fiddles with the hem of his shirt while trying to listen to Shitty’s rambling. He can’t make the hairs on the back of his neck stand down.

Back at the bus, Bitty corners Jack. “Can we have a conversation?” he asks lowly, biting his lip.

“When we stop for the night?” Jack says.

Bitty nods. “That’ll work.”

Dex finds a truck stop outside the city where they can shower and eat and sleep safely. There’s a diner attached, where Bitty and Jack get a booth. Bitty orders a coffee and Jack gets a chocolate milk.

“You wanted to have a conversation?” Jack prompts, biting his straw.

“Uh, yeah.” Bitty carefully sets down his mug. “Kent Parson is a zombie. Chowder told me that you two were close in hockey? I was just wondering if there was anything I could do to, like, help you talk it out? It must be a shock for you.” Jack purses his lips, and Bitty scrambles to correct himself. “Or if you don’t want to, I mean that’s fine too. It’s probably really intrusive and I shouldn’t have assumed that you’d—yeah, I mean, you’re closer to Shitty and Lardo anyway, like you’d go to them first, of course. If you even wanted to go to anyone at all.”

“Bittle, it’s fine. Thank you for—um. Do you still want to talk?”

Bitty nods. “Yeah, if you’re comfortable.”

“When I was eighteen years old, I overdosed on my prescription anti-anxiety medication. It was right before the draft, and I wasn’t dealing well with the stress. Obviously. Kent, uh Parse, was staying with my family the week before the draft, and he was the one who found me when I overdosed.” Jack looks down at the table, tracing the grain of the wood with his thumbnail. “I flatlined. That’s what his response was about. K– _Parse_ found me, technically dead, on the bathroom floor, days before our careers were supposed to start. His did. Mine, uh, didn’t.”

“Oh, Jack.” Bitty’s voice brims with warmth. “I’m so sorry.”

Jack shakes his head. “Anyway, running into him has reminded me of some loose ends. We both owe each other a lot of apologies. Teenagers aren’t exactly the nicest people, and frankly, especially not teenage hockey players.”

“Was that the first time you’ve seen each other since, um, the draft?” Bitty asks carefully.  
Jack nods, taking a sip of his chocolate milk.

Bitty drains the rest of his coffee. “Well, thank you for humoring me and helping me understand. What if we run back into him? He’s a zombie.”

“I haven’t thought about that. I...don’t know what we should do. He was my best friend, and he seems to be more aware than the other Affected we’ve run into.” Jack fiddles with the straw. “But I don’t like the idea of leaving someone who might end up hurting someone else.”

“I doubt it will become an issue, Jack. I mean, what were the odds that we’d run into him the first time?” Bitty raps on the tabletop. “C’mon, let’s go clean up. Today was weird and tomorrow will be less so, I promise.”

Jack leaves payment on the table and follows Bitty out of the diner.

 

 

Bitty wakes with a start the following morning, in the silvery light of dawn. Jack didn’t wake him up for training. Remembering their conversation from the night before, and the fact that Kent Parson has means and cause to show up here, Bitty slips out of his bunk, grabbing his knife from under his pillow before he sneaks off the bus.

A little park arcs around the back of the truck stop, for families to take breaks on long road trips and let pets and children stretch their legs. Jack is standing by a picnic table, wearing running shoes and stretching his hamstrings. Bitty starts toward him, two hundred yards away, but slows when he sees a figure crossing the park towards Jack.

Bitty hurries now, drawing his knife and jogging to the park. He doesn’t want to spook Jack himself, but he certainly doesn’t want that figure to get to him first. As he gets closer, the figure pulls into focus, and Bitty recognizes it as Kent Parson, back for who knows what reason, but it can’t be a good one. Bitty slows again, aware that Kent had been more sentient than other undead they’d come across—perhaps more freshly turned, or affected by a different strain—and perhaps he just wants to talk.

Jack has earbuds in, that’s how close Bitty is to tell. He can’t hear Kent or Bitty approaching.

Kent gets there first, pulls Jack off-balance and shoves him to the ground, pinning him with his foot high on Jack’s chest. Bitty arrives moments later at a dead sprint, ramming into Kent’s stomach with his shoulder, launching him off of Jack. With a few quick movements, he has Kent kneeling back on his heels, hands pinned to the ground behind him with one of Bitty’s feet, head pulled back by Bitty’s hand fisted in his hair. Bitty presses the point of his knife to Kent’s throat.

“Jack, are you okay?” Bitty asks, stuck watching Jack heave for breath and clamber back up. Jack nods, rubbing his chest where Kent had planted his foot. “You didn’t wake me up, and I was worried, so I went to check on you. Lucky I did, huh?” He pulls Kent’s head back. To Kent, Bitty spits, “You cowardly piece of chicken shit.”

Jack’s gaze bounces between Kent and Bitty, finally landing on the knife poking into Kent’s throat. “Bittle, don’t kill him.”

Bitty jerks Kent’s head to the side, exposing more neck on the side where the knife is. “He _attacked_ you, Jack, and you were best friends. Imagine what he’d do to a stranger.”

“Yeah, we were _best friends_. I don’t care how undead someone is—would you kill Shitty?” Jack crosses his arms.

His grip on Kent’s hair doesn’t relax, but the knife doesn’t press quite so hard into Kent’s throat. “He followed us here. He sought you out, Jack, just to try and kill you.”

Jack looks away, argument waning. “Bittle, I can’t let you kill someone I know, someone I—” he sighs.

“We protect people, Jack, and I can’t live with knowing that someone might get hurt because we got sentimental—”

“This is the one time I’ll ask this of you, Bitty!” Jack shouts, forgetting that it’s early morning, forgetting that he needs to be the leader and selfless and just, forgetting to keep the desperation out of his voice.

Bitty swallows, dropping neither the knife nor Jack’s imploring gaze. “He’s not where he was last night. He doesn’t have that consciousness that we saw. He’s more likely to hurt people now, Jack, without feeling any hesitation or remorse.” Bitty watches Jack’s jaw clench, a muscle in his neck jump. “But we’ve reduced the number of Affected by a lot these last couple weeks, and probably more before I joined up.” He drops the knife from Kent’s neck.

“ _Thank_ you,” Jack croaks out.

“But we need to leave soon, so he can’t follow. This might put us at risk personally.”

Jack sets his jaw and nods, staring at Kent, vulnerable and incapacitated in Bitty’s hold. “Let’s go, then.”

 

 

“We’re going east, boys,” Shitty announces from the front of the Haus. “And Lardo.”

They take their time, stopping by small towns and bigger cities to restock and kill some Affected, more and more often the farther east they get. Jack and Bitty still spar every morning, and Bitty has become significantly more comfortable with close combat.

“I think,” Bitty says, panting, “that the Kent thing was the breakthrough or whatever.”

Jack steps back and shakes out the front of his sweaty t-shirt. “Why do you think it was that?”  
Well, Bitty knows the answer, now. He knows that Jack has taken up a place in his heart a little more exclusive than just friendship, and oh _boy_ is he going to repress that as best he can. Seeing Jack unaware of Kent kicked into Bitty’s instincts, knowledge that he could help him, knowledge that if Bitty didn’t help, that Jack would be hurt and it would be all Bitty’s fault. The reason he managed to pin Kent was because the other option was Jack’s getting hurt, and Bitty is _not_ about to say that! Out loud! To Jack! Who’s probably straight!

Instead, Bitty flounders, masking his hesitation by chugging half a bottle of water. “I think it was just because I didn’t think about it? Maybe because it was only one zombie? Either way, go me.”

Jack’s eyebrows furrow and Bitty can see that he wants to push the topic, pin it down to one reason, but instead Jack lets it go. “We can be done. Do you want coffee?”

They’ve been making it a routine after their sparring to get breakfast when they’re in town, little outings that feel a lot like dates but Bitty isn’t going to entertain that thought.

After Bitty gets his latte and Jack doctors his coffee with the smallest possible amount of cream, they find a table by the plate-glass front window and sit in silence for a few minutes, waiting for their drinks to cool and enjoying watching the town wake up.

Bitty kicks his toes into the ground. “Do you think this will end?”

“What do you mean?” Jack asks, taking a sip of his coffee.

“I don’t know,” Bitty says with a shrug. “Do you think the Affected will stop?”

Jack fiddles with a packet of sugar, a wrinkle forming between his brows. His eyes look tired, but more than just from early mornings and hard days—he looks exhausted to the bone, and maybe a little sad, and Bitty wants to stop his fingers from snapping the edge of the paper packet by wrapping Jack’s hand in his, but he can’t, so he doesn’t. Just watches the paper warp with each flick of Jack’s thumbnail. “They would have to determine a cause, and then figure out how to stop that.” He pauses, both in his words and his fidgeting. “It’s been a few months, and there hasn’t been any news about getting even close to a cure. Why do you ask?”

“I just—” _am terrified of losing my friends_ or _am afraid I’ll be spending the rest of my life on a bus_ or _don’t want to lose my only reason for seeing you every day_ “—miss home, I guess. I haven’t talked to my parents since I left, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to go back,” Bitty half-lies. He doesn’t miss home so much.

“We could swing by on our way,” Jack offers, snapping the lid back onto his coffee cup. “You could cook in a real kitchen for once,” he says with a smirk.

“Jack Zimmermann, you hush. I do just fine over campfires and on the bus.” Bitty rolls his eyes. “And I’m not out to my parents, you remember? I don’t really want to go back.”

Jack cocks his head. “What will you do after this is all done?” Bitty has to be imagining the concern in his look.

Bitty laughs humorlessly, nervously turning his coffee cup back and forth. “I mean, that’s why I asked if you think it’ll end. I’m hoping we’ll all stay together, I guess, but I know that life gets in the way, so I’m kind of resigning myself to going home.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence. Bitty takes apart the cardboard sleeve from his coffee cup and begins to shred it. “I mean,” he continues, “I wouldn’t _have_ to go home, I guess. I could stick close by to Boston or Buffalo or something, I suppose, but they certainly are further north than I’m used to!” He laughs breathlessly. “But I think I’d rather be out and cold than warm and miserable.”

“Was it really so bad in Georgia?” Jack asks sincerely.

“Well, at the time I thought it was fine. I kinda felt bad sometimes, but it wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to,” Bitty says, a miserable twist to his mouth. “It wasn’t till I came out to you and Shitty and the rest of y’all that I realized what kind of life I could have been living, being comfortable and not alone, and now that I know how nice that is, I don’t want to go back to where I was. I’m not saying I couldn’t pretend to be straight, but I just...I don’t _want_ to anymore.”

Jack hums thoughtfully. “If you can’t find somewhere to live and you don’t want to go back home,” he says, picking his words carefully, “let me know, and my parents or I can arrange something for you. Montréal is pretty far north, but if you’d be willing, there’d be a place for you.”

Jack cannot be offering his family’s assistance (his family’s home? _His_ home?) to Bitty. Bitty is small and boring and very clearly gay, and all he has going for him is his shooting and his baking. Maybe his self-deprecating sense of humor tricked Jack into liking him? Jack _cannot_ like Bitty, because if he did particularly like him, then Bitty would be up shit creek without a paddle. The seeming permanence of living with Jack, and Jack’s maybe liking him as more than a casual friend, would one hundred percent fuck with Bitty’s ability to differentiate platonic affection from anything else. (Bitty can’t let himself think _Jack_ and _romance_ in the same thought.) There will be no _getting over_ this infatuation if he spends more time with Jack one-on-one. The early-morning training and breakfast friend-dates have already ballooned this infatuation into a pathetic crush. If Bitty moves to Montreal, he will stay at home like a lovesick puppy while Jack moves on with his life and his career and marries some beautiful French-Canadian blonde with a modeling contract.

“That’s,” Bitty takes a gulp of air, “that’s very kind of you. I’ll keep that in mind.” Which is as good as a “no,” but he’s trying to be polite about it.

“But if you think this is cold, Montréal is a whole different thing,” Jack says with a grin. “You might just have to hibernate for the winter.”

“Jack Zimmermann, do not tease me like this. I make your food!” Bitty says indignantly. “I cannot believe I put up with this.” But he’s smiling, too.

Jack holds his gaze for a second too long, a second that twists at Bitty’s heart, and then Jack ducks his head and slurps at his coffee. “So, you’re still not covering over your left side; it’s easy for opponents to sneak up on you from that direction. We’ll try to fix that the rest of this week, and then work on your upper body strength, because you’ve got the precision but not enough force behind your attacks,” and the moment is lost and Bitty sighs.

 

 

They’re in Virginia in early October. The trees are starting to turn and the air goes from languid to crisp in a weekend. They’ve been stopped at a campground for a couple days now, luxuriating in the facilities and fresh woodsy air.

“No, yeah, mom, we’ll head up that way.” Shitty pauses, letting the phone squawk into his ear. “We’re in Virginia. I’ll look up a route when we hang up. You’re saying Samwell?” The phone squawks again. “Yeah, we’ll be safe, I promise. Oh, also? Has Ed gotten a credit card bill recently? That needs paid and I won’t get to the bank before it’s due. Yeah, you just need the bill and I’ll call them and let them know that you’ll be coming in for me.” He pauses again. “‘Swawesome. Thanks, mom! Love you.” He ends the call. “My mom says it’s the worst about half an hour from Boston—a town called Samwell,” he says to the handful of them littered around the campsite.

“So we go there and do what we can, right?” Ransom asks. “We’ve got at least a little practice in by now, I’d say.”

Holster scoffs. “Yeah, a few months is more than a little, bro. We oughta be certified by this point.”

“Dex, can we leave early tomorrow? Stock up on ammo,” Shitty nods to Bitty, “and food on our way out?”

Dex nods. “That’ll work. I’ll need directions, but I don’t have a problem driving early.”

“Cool. I’ll go find everyone else and tell them,” Shitty says, setting off into the woods.

* * *

 

That night finds Jack, Bitty, Lardo, and Shitty seated around the little campfire they’ve built, soaking in the cool air and appreciating the quiet. Around ten, Shitty stretches and yawns and announces, “I’m going to turn in. Early start tomorrow. Feels like a big one.”

Lardo sits up from her slumping onto him. “Yeah, it’s gonna be a long day. ‘Night, boys,” she says to Jack and Bitty. They echo the sentiment back to her.

Bitty sighs and pulls up his knees to his chest, balancing on the leveled log. “It does feel like this one’s important, doesn’t it?”

Jack nods, staring into the campfire. “Are you worried?”

“Oh, definitely,” Bitty says with an ironic laugh. “I mean, this is probably the most dangerous situation we’ve gone into yet, so that’s scary, and then what if it’s...it?” He takes a shaky breath. “What if we don’t make it out?”

“Hey, Bittle, come here,” Jack says, patting the space on the log next to him. Bitty sits. “Look at what we’ve survived so far. You’ve become a better and better fighter since you joined us. I don’t want to say you don’t have anything to worry about, but if they’re the same boring zombies we’ve been killing for weeks now, it’s going to have to be a lot of them to pose any challenge to you.”

“What if we have to kill every single one to stop this, Jack?” Bitty asks heavily. “ _Every_ single zombie.”

They both know who he’s talking about. Jack clenches his jaw. “That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get to it,” he says with an air of finality.

Bitty is too uncomfortable to say anything beyond that. A breeze makes the fire gutter, and he shivers.

“Oh, here,” Jack says, shrugging out of his flannel and wrapping it around Bitty’s shoulders. Bitty shudders again, this time at Jack’s hands brushing his neck. At the same time that his heart flutters, a rock lodges itself in his stomach, dread at the coming day and the thought that Jack may one day know about Bitty’s pathetic crush on him.

“Sorry for bringing that up. We don’t need to...dwell on that,” Bitty says drowsily.

“It makes sense to think about that,” Jack says, leaning into Bitty a little.

Overwhelmed by fear and exhaustion and sadness and even a little longing, Bitty gives in and leans back onto Jack’s shoulder, fresh terror rushing under his skin. Jack doesn’t move, doesn’t tense, nothing Bitty might have expected. Without shifting on Jack’s shoulder, Bitty can’t help glancing at his face, just to know. Jack isn’t looking at him, but his cheek is lifted in a slight smile and Bitty feels what might be hope zinging under his ribs. In the fading firelight, Bitty rests on Jack’s shoulder and with Jack’s flannel wrapped around him, and even though the thought of tomorrow strikes cold fear deep into him, the thought of something good afterwards sustains him.

 

 

Bitty wakes up to late-morning light streaming onto his cot, on the moving bus headed, apparently, to Samwell, Massachusetts.

He sits up, stretches, rubs his eyes, slouches over. “Mmmm, how long we been on the road?” he asks sleepily, smacking his lips.

No one answers him, but he does glance around and they’re looking at him. “Y’all?”

Lardo leans up to Dex. “Can we stop somewhere soon?” He nods. Lardo swings up out of her seat. “Bits, come on back.” She leads him to the back of the bus, her expression closed-off.

Bitty follows her back, discomfort settling in his stomach. “What’s wrong?” He looks back up toward the front of the bus, taking a head count. “Wh—where’s Jack?”

“That’s the thing. He split off from us last night.”

Bitty’s stomach drops to his feet.

“He left a note, um.” She digs into her pants pocket and pulls out a tightly-folded piece of her paper. “Yeah, he says that after leaving Kent in Dallas that he’s been more and more worried about being a liability to the group and our effectiveness in fighting zombies and that he’ll be available if we ever seek him out again but he didn’t leave any contact info or anything, so, yeah.” She blows out a quick breath. “There’s not much we can do, besides.”

Bitty sits on the couch at the back of the bus, mind whirling with the still-present fear for today, worry for Jack, worry for the rest of his friends, and a sour anger at being abandoned, both for his friends’ sakes and, selfishly, his own. Yesterday, last evening, had been tentatively good, hopeful even, but that’s all slashed to shreds at Jack’s absence. “Can I see the note?”

Lardo hands it to him. It’s crumpled and creased from being stuffed into Lardo’s pocket, and the words are smudged, like Jack wrote quickly and folded it immediately, not pausing to second-guess his decision. The paper is unevenly torn from one of Jack’s notebooks, prompting Bitty to check under the bench seat for Jack’s laptop and books, which are there.

“His duffel and axe are gone. I...I don’t know, Bitty. It looks like he took just necessities with him.” Lardo peers at him with concern. “Did he say anything to you last night about thinking about this?”

Bitty shakes his head. “I mean, I mentioned that dealing with Kent may eventually happen, and of course I regretted it immediately, just because that was a rude thing to say. And,” Bitty thinks about leaning against Jack, seeing him maybe smile, and revises that to a tense grimace, and that Jack was too polite to pull away, “never mind.”

Lardo lets him get away without mentioning it. “Like I said, there’s nothing we can do. We’ll be at Samwell in five hours. Shitty?”

Shitty hops up and hustles to the rear. “My mom says it’s packed full of zombies at Samwell. Back when Rans and Holster and I picked up Lards, there was this alley that was just wall-to-wall undead the whole way back, which is what we think is going on here. Ransom and Chowder are going to do some research when we stop, just to see what’s come out of Samwell since the start of the Terminally Affected.”

“Also, this is breakfast,” Lardo says of the McDonald’s they pull into. “Shits, keep the pink stuff to a minimum.”

Bitty takes Jack’s laptop with him, thankfully fully charged. Yeah, it’s invasive. But Jack isn’t here and either one of them might be dead soon and the other wouldn’t know, so. He’s gonna be nosy.

Ransom and Chowder research Samwell and find relevant information that they’ll summarize for him later, Bitty’s sure. Bitty’s research is a little more personal, first guessing Jack’s laptop password (“h0ckey”), then going straight to his email. It’s all in French.

“Nursey? Can you help?” Bitty asks.

Nursey clicks and clicks and clicks then says, “There’s no _y’all_ options on here.”

Bitty pinches Nursey’s forearm and takes the laptop back when he flinches away. “Thank you for fixing it. No thank you for the uncalled-for chirping.”

Jack’s computer is well-organized, bless him. Bitty doesn’t read through everything, just skims for an application for contacts and through Jack’s email for perhaps his parents’ addresses. He has most of an email drafted when he realizes that no matter how blasé he sounds, there’s no way he can contact Jack’s parents about Jack’s contact information without worrying them, additionally realizing that though he’s heard stories about them, they’ve heard nothing, as far as he knows, about him. With a huff, Bitty closes out of Jack’s email and scowls at the computer, trying to remember what kind of phone Jack had and if it could receive emails. Bitty’s sure that Jack has a cell phone—what person under sixty these days _doesn’t_ —but for the life of him, he cannot recall seeing it.

 

_Hey, Jack._

_Can’t remember if your phone can get emails, but I figured I’d try. We’re worried about you and want to know that you’re safe, so please reply to this when you get a chance. We’re going to hit Samwell this afternoon, and I’ll email you with where we eventually end up, in case you want to come back._

_Hope you’re safe,_

_Bitty._

Bitty scrubs his hands through his hair, refrains from adding _miss you_ or something more embarrassing to the sign-off, and sends the email to Jack from Jack’s own address, which Bitty thinks is dumb and a little bit hopeless, but it’s all he’s got.

 

 

They do hit Samwell around two in the afternoon. As soon as they cross the city limits, the streets and sidewalks are packed with undead milling around. Dex pushes the bus through the crowds, indifferent to the bumping of zombies underneath. The rest of them stare out the windows, looking for anything that stands out.

After six minutes of inching through Samwell, Chowder clears his throat. “Uh, Dex? Or everyone? Are they looking different to you?”

Bitty focuses on one Affected, taking in its features. Its skin is mottled (standard) and gait lopsided (nothing he hasn’t seen before), but upon closer inspection its eyes are bright red and the tongue hanging from its mouth is actually several thin black tongues moving independently of each other.

“Yeah, holy fuck, those are weird,” Ransom comments from beside the door. “Shits, I think your mom was onto something.”

They continue for a few more minutes, eyeing the fallen zombies run over by the bus. The undead don’t stay down, instead gradually struggling to their feet and continuing their eerie shuffle, disregarding any lost limbs along the way.

“Brah, these houses look like no one’s lived in them in _years_ ; why are there so many zombies around?” Shitty asks, nose pressed against a window.

“It looks like college housing,” Ransom points out. “Frats, or something. Look, they’ve all got the letters.”

It is indeed the off-campus frat row, and the houses look like they had been in disrepair long before the zombie sickness swept the eastern seaboard. Roofs are caved in, fences tipped over, porches sunken to ground-level up and down the street. One house in particular stands out, though, right in the middle of the block: it’s about the same size and build as the others, but looks to be in pristine condition. The paint looks fresh, the windows gleam in the clear fall-afternoon light, and the yard is conspicuously vacant of any monsters. A flag draped from the porch indicates that it’s the lacrosse team’s house.

Dex puts the bus in park right in front of the house. “This looks like the place, guys. Something is wrong about it.”

The interior of the house is entirely lit up as well, so the inside is visible from the outdoors. Glittering glass and crystal fixtures illuminate surprisingly elegant furnishings, wallpapers, and hangings that hearken back to art deco and the Jazz Age. Nursey hums. “You think this looks suspicious?”

Lardo snorts. “Yeah, it’s pretty understated.”

“Didn’t know the Great fuckin’ Gatsby bugged off to Mass after hitting that lady with his car,” Shitty adds.

Ransom fetches the weapons from the wardrobe and passes them around. “Don’t try to get all of them, of course. We’re going for the house. Get in, shut it up, kill whatever monsters are inside. Once it’s safe inside, we figure it out from there. One step at a time, dudes. Don’t be stupid.” He claps Holster on the shoulder. “Great fighting with you, bro.”

Holster swallows thickly, blinking rapidly. “It’s an honor, my dude.”

“Fuck, guys, you aren’t thinking–” Shitty sniffles, “we’re not gonna–”

“No! No, it’s not like that, Shits,” Holster says. “It’s just, my mom would miss him.”

Bitty sniffs from the back of the bus. “Y’all, we can’t do goodbyes, or I’m gonna get all weepy and it’s just gonna be messy all around.” Ransom’s taking charge twinges deep in his stomach, reminding him of Jack’s absence. Bitty refuses to dwell on goodbyes at this time, instead electing to ask, “Do you want me shooting or fighting with y’all?”

Ransom gazes out the window, mentally calculating distance and odds. “I think it would be best for you to come to the house with the rest of us. I don’t want to risk leaving you out here. Not that I don’t think that you can’t take care of yourself,” Ransom rushes to add, “but there’s a lot of Affected out here, and splitting up rarely works. Unless you’re Jack making tactics, but we aren’t, so we won’t.”

Ransom leads the attack and Holster ushers them off the bus with about ten seconds between each of them, giving each person the chance to get their footing but not allowing enough time to get lost in the unrelenting swarm of zombies.

Bitty grips his knife, chopping at temples and necks, going for the soft parts of the monsters. The street between the bus and the yard doesn’t seem to empty of creatures, even with the rate at which the group is dropping them. Bitty catches sight of Dex breaking off to the front of the bus, revving his chainsaw and waving it without regard for what parts of the monsters he slices to ribbons. Holster works the opposite direction, trying to clear a gap and head off the Affected streaming in.

Lardo and Nursey follow directly behind Ransom, fanning to the sides to clear a wider path, allowing room for Chowder and Shitty to swing wide. Bitty takes up the rear, stabbing at the stragglers that make it all the way to the center.

Maybe it’s the proximity to the odd house, the presumed epicenter of the cause of the Terminally Affected, but these monsters seem to be tougher to kill than the ones the group had encountered before. A solid stab under the chin had brought down a zombie back in Tennessee; now for Bitty, it requires a stab to slow down the creature and then a deep cut across its throat to fell it. As a result, the group creeps across the road, each of them, rather than mowing through the Affected, taking care to ensure one is completely dead (again) before moving to the next one.

Ransom crosses the property line to the house and looks lost as to what to do, so he crosses back over onto the street and picks back up in killing Affected with his shovel, tag-teaming with Nursey. Lardo and Nursey do the same when they reach the property line, flattening the point as the rest of the group catches up. As the head of one more Affected bounces to the ground, sawed off by Dex with quick precision, the group steps over the property line as one, marveling at the mysterious invisible barrier between them and the zombies on the street.

“Nursey, Shitty, you two take the attic,” Ransom says. “Lardo, Dex, and I will do the second floor. Holster, Chowder, and Bitty, you’re on the ground floor and block off the basement. So, uh, we’ll work from the ground floor up.”

Holster kicks in the front door and takes an immediate right. The rest of them follow, fanning out within the house. The interior is bright and clean and somehow filled with Terminally Affected. Bitty ends up in the kitchen, which is packed to the gills with zombies.

They immediately hone in on the fresh meat and press in on him. Bitty takes his knife to two with his practiced stabbing and slicing, but for some reason these ones are barely slowing down, let alone falling. He suppresses the fear clawing at his throat, instead scanning the room for another weapon.

Bitty can hear Holster grunting with effort in the living room. “They’re not going down!” Holster bellows of the monsters.

A cackle with a hysterical edge to it, the likes of which Bitty has never heard from anyone, comes from the bedroom Chowder’s in at the back of the house. “Just like Jamie Benn!”

“Who?” Bitty screams back, shoving through the zombies. _Knives_ , Bitty thinks. _There should be knives somewhere around here._ He grits his teeth against the oddly cool skin of the monsters as they follow his path. They leave sooty smudges on his arms and shirt, their skin disintegrating when they touch him.

“I’ll explain later,” Chowder yells.

Bitty finally reaches the counter and starts digging through drawers and cupboards. “Oh, god bless,” he grunts when he finds a meat cleaver in a drawer. It’s all steel and heavier than it looks: good for causing damage. Bitty promptly whips around and chops at the neck of the zombie nearest him. The cleaver gets stuck in its spine, but Bitty uses a heavy-bottomed saucepan to smack the head all the way off, and just like that, he has his new strategy.

Which would be great, except that the number of undead doesn’t seem to be decreasing, at least not on the first floor. Nursey thunders down the staircase and slides into the kitchen on the hardwood floor. “Why the hell are there so many down here?” He asks, watching as Bitty whacks at zombie after zombie, standing on a whole layer of dead ones that litter the floor.

“Nursey, please help,” Bitty says, not breaking focus to even glance his way. “Check the doors, the basement, anything. Find what’s causing this.”

Nursey leaves, and Lardo takes his place, carrying something out in front of her. “Bits, preheat the oven. I’ve got a book to burn.”

Bitty _does_ take a look at her this time. In Lardo’s arms is a large book with a crumbling leather cover and rough-edged pages. Black and gilded gothic letters grace the front cover, and Bitty’s getting a seriously creepy vibe from it.

“Do ovens get that hot?” Bitty asks, taking a moment to decapitate another zombie.

“How hot do ovens get?” Lardo asks from the threshold to the kitchen, careful not to let the book touch her body.

Bitty chops a monster’s head off. “Five hundred is about the hottest for most ovens. Will that be enough?”

“Dude, paper burns at 451º,” Lardo says. “That’s why it’s called _Fahrenheit 451_ , because it’s about burning books.”

“Yeah, throw it in,” Bitty says. He opens the oven door and a zombie gets a hold of his hair. “Shit!” he hisses, while chopping off the monster’s arm at the shoulder.

Lardo slides the book onto the middle rack, slams shut the oven door, and locks it. Without pausing, she sets the oven to bake at 500º and grabs her knives to help Bitty.

“Why were there so many down here?” Lardo asks, spinning around and slicing off a zombie’s hand. “We cleared out the upstairs so quick.”

Nursey comes back at that moment. “Front door was open, and for some reason they could get onto the property. Shut and locked the door, and Dex is stationed there now. Waiting.”

“Cool. We’re just waiting for this creepy-ass book to burn,” Lardo says.

Nursey gapes at her instead of helping. “You’re burning a _book_?”

“Chill, Nurse. Pretty sure it’s the evil thing making all this mess.” Lardo kicks a monster’s stomach and hacks at its neck when it doubles over. “Please help.”

“What book was it? Did it have a title or anything?” Nursey _still isn’t helping_.

“Nursey!” Bitty yells. “Can you wait ten minutes?”

At which prompting, Nursey _does_ finally step into the kitchen and help chop up Terminally Affected. Skin flakes off the monsters like ash and flutters through the air. As they work, there do seem to be fewer zombies showing up.

Bitty takes a step into the hallway to take half a minute to catch his breath and shake out his arms. Soot is smudged up his arms and on his jaw, from brushing against the monsters. When he catches his breath Bitty sniffs. “Do y’all smell that?”

Lardo coughs. “Smell what?”

Tendrils of weirdly opaque smoke float out of the oven, accompanied by an acrid smell. “The book.”

“Good,” Lardo says.

Bitty jumps back in and kills one more zombie till the smoke is billowing out of the oven and he can’t breathe well.

“Boys, get down and crawl to the hallway,” Lardo instructs, ducking down and doing the same herself.

Dex has the chainsaw off, his shoulder braced against the front door that shakes periodically from the monsters beating at it. “Something happening?” he asks over his shoulder.

“You might want to join us on the floor, babe,” Nursey says, nodding to indicate the billowing smoke starting to come in from the kitchen.

Dex huddles down next to them, shirt collar tugged up over his mouth and nose. Ransom and Holster also crawl into the now-crowded hallway from the living room.

“We got all the ones in there,” Holster says. “Is the smoke on purpose?”

Chowder and Shitty stumble into the hallway too. “Is the house on fire?” Chowder asks.

“We’re burning a creepy book,” Lardo says. “Zombies outside, smoke inside.”

The house begins shaking on its foundation.

“Yeah, okay,” Shitty says, tugging Chowder down to the floor with him.

They wait in terrified silence as the smoke thickens and fills the house. The doors and windows rattle in their frames, and the dangling crystals on the chandeliers clink musically, juxtaposing the groans of the undead outside and the thunderous shaking inside.

Popping sounds start from the kitchen, like a string of firecrackers. Shitty makes a whining noise in his throat and Bitty tucks his head under his arms, feeling the building shake apart around him.

* * *

 

When Bitty pulls his head up a minute later, the house is completely changed. What had been bright, Art Deco furnishings have turned run-down and barely habitable. The smoke is dissipated and Bitty can’t even smell that it was there in the first place.

“Ewwwww!” Bitty hears from Holster in the living room. “Is this…”

“Argh!” Ransom exclaims beside Holster. “It looks like jizz, right?”

Bitty so intensely doesn’t want to know, but it doesn’t seem like he has any choice in the matter when Holster hauls him up by the shoulders. “Come see this, bro.”

The living room floor is coated in an inch-thick layer of what looks uncannily (and so unfortunately) like ...yeah. Though, it _is_ rapidly disappearing, be it evaporating or sinking into the floor.

“It’s gotta be from the remains of the zombies, right? Like, medically, there’s no way…” Ransom trails off. “I might barf, dude.”

“Bitty, this oven is fucked,” Shitty calls from the kitchen. “But, like, so is the rest of the house, I guess.”

Bitty happily turns tail on the living room and goes to survey the kitchen. What had been beautiful, top-of-the-line, and ornate is now dingy, lopsided, and maybe salvageable. Bitty sighs. “She had been so nice, too,” he says, already reminiscing about the zombie-filled (but still undeniably gorgeous) kitchen.

Shitty is leaned over the sink, nose almost pressed against the front window. “Brahs, look at this shit,” he says, waving Bitty and Lardo over.

The street is still packed, but now with confused living people. Their clothes are still tattered, but they’re whole and alive again.

“Do we help them?” Bitty asks, mentally calculating how much food he can make with what they have on the bus.

Lardo snorts. “They’ll figure it out. We’ll just pretend like we don’t know what’s going on. Let’s move in.”

* * *

 

Chowder makes Nursey and Dex share the first floor bedroom that _would_ have been his, till he found them sucking face in it when he came back from the bus with his bag. (“Guys, I was gone for like two minutes!”)

Ransom and Holster claim the attic and cobble together a set of bunk beds that Bitty is not going to spend time worrying about, he isn’t. Shitty and Lardo share the rear second-floor bedroom and Bitty isn’t going to ask any questions because frankly it’s none of his business, but if he’s headed down the stairs and their door happens to be open and he happens to see only one bed then that’s just a coincidence and he’s happy for them. Chowder and Bitty each get a bedroom that faces the road.

“Do we pay rent?” Ransom asks in the kitchen later that evening. “Or, like, utility bills? Was that happening before we kinda blew the place up?”

Shitty flips through an official-looking book. “I can’t find our address in any records after 1922. Which is weird, but there’s still electricity and water to the building, so I’m positing that we just ignore it and hope.”

Holster shrugs. “Okay by me.”

“What book was that, anyway?” Ransom asks Lardo, now that the oven has stopped shuddering occasionally.

Lardo shrugs. “I just got a weird vibe from it. We can look for any remains, I guess?” She opens the oven to find a pile of ash in the bottom of it, but part of the spine of the book is still intact. “Can anyone read this?” The gothic lettering is burned out in places, and the whole thing is black-on-black.

Holster rubs some of the soot off the lettering. “Oh shit, you guys. We destroyed the Necronomicon.”

 

 

Bitty has drafted fifteen emails in the last hour and a half on Jack’s laptop. None are good, but a few low points include:

 

_Hey, Jack._

_We burned a book and the zombies are all cured. You may have noticed, i guess, but maybe not since who knows where you are._

 

_Hey, Jack._

_We destroyed the source of the Terminally Affected and now we’re living in this house at [ask Shitty what our address is]_

 

_Hey, Jack._

_You may have noticed, but we cured all the Terminally Affected. How should I know what you’ve noticed; you left without saying goodbye. Whatever. Doesn’t matter if we know if you’re alive or not. It’s not like...whatever. I’ll probably be heading back to Georgia soon. I might even tell everyone else when I’m planning to leave and where I’ll be going. And why. They’ll probably miss me almost as much as I miss you but_

 

_Hey, Jack._

_We lived through curing the zombies. If you did too, please come here so i can kiss your face because turns out im desperately in love with you and i miss you like a limb bullSHIT i can’t send that_

 

What he does end up sending:

 

_Hey, Jack._

_We stopped the Terminally Affected and now have a house in Samwell. I’ll probably head back to Georgia sometime to see my family, and I’m sure the others are planning on trips of their own, but we’re settling down here. I know it’s out of your way, but if you want to swing by if you’re headed back to Canada, you’re welcome anytime. We’d all love to see you again. We’re on 151 Jason St. in Samwell, so you can find us. I still don’t know if you’re receiving emails, but what’s the harm in trying._

_Anyway, if you don’t get this email, I doubt we’ll ever see each other again. What were the odds that we’d meet the first time, let alone a second? I hope you get this email and find the time to visit us. Like I said, we miss you lots._

 

And, since Bitty has no idea if Jack will be reading this, and he’s done with being afraid:

_I miss you lots._

_Yours,_

_Bitty_

 

Bitty hits send, waits for the _woosh_ , and snaps the laptop closed, prepared to ignore it for the next week.

 

 

Shitty holds a house meeting in the living room the next afternoon. Most of the furniture from the Haus has been moved in: the nasty green armchair lost its slipcover in the move, but luckily there’s a couch that matches it already in the house, much to Bitty’s horror. Holster, Ransom, and Chowder squeeze onto the couch; Nursey and Dex are somehow in each other’s laps in the armchair, and Bitty and Lardo each pull a dining chair from the kitchen table. Shitty stands before them like an army captain addressing his regiment.

“H.P. Lovecraft lived in Providence in the early 20th century. He wrote fantasy and horror works, with limited commercial success. One of his more famous works introduced the supposedly fictional _Necronomicon_ , a grimoire that, when misused, releases untold horrors upon the world. This is the guy who created Cthulhu, so if even he thinks the horrors are untold, they must be pretty fucked up.” Shitty takes a breath. “According to its Wikipedia page, there are five original copies of the _Necronomicon_ , one of which is in the library of a ‘fictional’ university in a ‘fictional’ Massachusetts town. This one must have been that one, and must have been disturbed about six months ago, when the Terminally Affected plague started. Destroying the book in fire has apparently stopped that which it caused. And now we have this gross old house and the ashes of the most cursed book in Lovecraftian canon. Cool shit, right?”

Ransom raises his hand. “Not to be smart, but is Wikipedia your only source?”

Shitty points at him. “Yes it is. Fuck academia. It fits the timeline so that’s what we’re going with. I can look up the Wikipedia page for Occam’s Razor, if you’re interested.”

“Is that all?” Nursey asks. “I told my mom I’d call this afternoon.”

“Yeah, I’ve gotta call my parents and siblings, too,” Dex says. “Haven’t caught up with them in a while.”

There’s a noise at the door. “I’ll get it!” Chowder says, falling off the side of the couch before sprinting to check the mail for coupons.

“Yeah, I suppose that’s all,” Shitty says, shrugging. “Just, if you find any ancient relics around the house, don’t fuck with them. We don’t need locusts. Also, we called the bus the Haus. I motion that we call this Haus II.”

“Seconded,” Dex says.

Lardo sighs. “All in favor say aye?”

A chorus of “ayes” echoes through the room and from the front door.

“Opposed?” Silence.

Lardo rolls her eyes. “Motion carried. We now live in Haus II.”

“Do we have dinner plans?” Holster asks, stretching his legs out in front of him.

Bitty puts his head in his hands. “I tried the oven this morning and she heats up but isn’t consistent. I’m just gonna do takeout till I can call someone to come fix her.”

“I can work on that tonight or tomorrow, Bitty,” Dex offers. “Don’t worry about it.”

After dinner, Bitty holes up in his room while Lardo and the other boys hook up a found Wii to play MarioKart.

 

 

Jack knocks on the door, but no one’s answering. He can hear the group inside, laughing and chatting, see the lights on in the downstairs rooms and in one room upstairs, and someone (he can guess who) is blasting pop music. He tries the knob, and the door is unlocked, so he lets himself in.

Most of them are in the living room, a video game playing music on the TV while Chowder stands in front of them, showing his phone around and saying, “And that’s how the whole world knows that Jamie Benn, captain of the Dallas Stars, doesn’t eat pussy. Oh! Jack! You’re here!”

They all whip around to stare at him in surprise and joy. Shitty leaps over the back of the couch and into Jack’s arms, yelling and reeking of weed. Jack laughs, stumbling under his weight. “You really should keep the door locked. Is, uh, is Bitty home?”

Lardo’s expression tightens. “Yeah, he’s upstairs.”

“Thanks, Lardo,” he says, shaking Shitty off. Before he can rethink what he’s doing for the umpteenth time, Jack takes the stairs two at a time to find the music on the second floor coming from behind a closed door.

Jack takes a breath.

Knocks.

Waits.

The music doesn’t stop, and no one answers. Jack shuffles his feet and knocks again.

The music turns down, and Jack can hear footsteps along with Bitty’s voice. “I swear, enough of y’all are playing MarioKart, you don’t need—” The door swings open. “Oh.” Bitty looks up at Jack, lips pulling into a smile. “You’re–why are you here?” he asks, pursing his lips and swallowing, Jack tracking the movement of his Adam’s apple.

Jack had a speech planned. He had more than 8 hours in the car on the way here, thinking about what he could say to explain himself. He can’t remember a word of it.

He did, however, have those 8 hours to imagine what kissing Bitty would be like, and it doesn’t even compare to the real thing. Miles upon miles of asphalt and construction (goddamn I-95), and Jack hadn’t been able to conceptualize the plushness of Bitty’s lips against his own, the gentle dip of Bitty’s waist, the feel of Bitty’s jaw cradled in Jack’s hand. Jack tilts his head, slotting Bitty’s lower lip between his, parting his lips a little and reveling in Bitty’s hands tightened on his shirt and the fact that Bitty is kissing him back. He loses himself in the warm press of Bitty’s lips on his, their noses bumping, the softness of Bitty’s cheek under his thumb, the pulse in his neck jumping under the heel of Jack’s hand. The earth slows to a halt beneath their feet; the noise downstairs and outside and from Bitty’s room fades to static; nothing exists to Jack in that moment but Bitty’s softness and solidness and the sweet, slick slide of their lips and the stretch of smiles behind them.

When he pulls back, Bitty keeps his eyes closed, but his lips are kiss-red and slack and a blush is rising high on his cheeks. Jack wraps his arms around his waist and pulls him close, pressing his face into Bitty’s hair. “I’m sorry I left without telling you. I’m sorry for making you worry.”

Bitty huffs into Jack’s chest, and it hits him with a pang of guilt that he can’t tell if it’s a laugh or a sob. “You ridiculous boy. Don’t you know we needed you?”

“You did well enough without me,” Jack says. “You guys saved the world.”

Bitty pulls away to look Jack in the eye. “Don’t _ever_ make us do it without you again.”

Jack smiles, eyes crinkling. “Planning on doing this again, are you?”

“Jack Zimmermann, do not _chirp_ me like this!” Bitty exclaims, burying his face back into Jack’s chest. “I missed you.” Jack stomach rumbles beside Bitty’s. “Have you eaten dinner?”

Jack chuckles, the laugh rumbling pleasantly through his chest, just under Bitty’s ear. “Not yet. I was too excited to get here.”

“You _silly_ boy. Come on, you’re eating mac and cheese till I can get to the store for some real groceries.” Bitty grabs his hand (sending a little thrill of joy through both of them) and drags him downstairs.

“So you drove eight straight hours to get here?” Bitty asks while measuring out the butter. The whole group is crammed into the tiny kitchen/dining area, kind of just staring at Jack.

Jack tips back in the dining chair. “Yeah. I left pretty much as soon as I got your emails.”

All eyes swivel towards Bitty. “You didn’t get the first one till today? I sent it...yesterday? Oh, wow, it feels like longer.”

“Almost two days ago, to be fair,” Lardo says.

Jack frowns. “No, you sent a bunch today. Like, more than a dozen.”

Bitty’s eyes go wide and his face drains of blood. “Did I send those?”

“I don’t...know. Shitty? Help?” Jack asks, dropping his chair back on all its legs.

Shitty taps him through his email app, finally deciding, “Oh, yeah, those are drafts, but you managed to find them.”

“That’s...not better,” Bitty mutters, dumping the whole pot of macaroni into a mixing bowl.

“Are they embarrassing? Emotional? Intimate? _Detailed_?” Holster asks with relish.

“They are,” Bitty says sternly, “none of your fucking _business_ , Adam Birkholtz.” He sets the mixing bowl full of macaroni in front of Jack. “Here you go, sweetheart.”

Ransom claps his hands. “Yep! They were dirty.”

Bitty frowns too. “ _Hush,_ ” he scolds. To Jack, he asks, “Are you going back to Montreal?”

Jack shakes his head while shoveling in, frankly, an absurd amount of mac and cheese. “I’ve missed the start of hockey season, so there’s no reason for me to go back. I’ve been living by my parents long enough. I might take a long weekend to get some of my things and see my parents again, but if you guys have room and don’t mind,” his eyes find Bitty’s, “I’ll stay here.”

Nursey scrolls through his phone. “There’s the private university right by here. I might finish my degree.”

Bitty shakes his head. “I need a job,” he says, “otherwise my parents will make me move back to Georgia.”

“Yeah, can you take your guns back when you visit? There’s, like, stats about having them in the house.” Ransom drums his index fingers on the table. “And I don’t want to die.”

Bitty waves his hand. “There’s no reason for me to have them here. I’m thinking about finding a bakery? And there’s no need for guns there, either.”

Jack busses and washes his bowl. “I know it’s early, but I think I’m gonna turn in. I’ve had a long day.”

Shitty raises his eyebrows. “Oh? Where are you thinking of crashing?” he asks, ends of his mustache wiggling.

Jack and Bitty look at each other, and that’s their mistake. They’re chased upstairs to hoots and hollering, hand in hand and laughing the whole way.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!  
> Many thanks to my beta Aech ([shakespunk](http://shakespunk.tumblr.com) on tumblr); their help was indispensable to the creation of this fic!  
> And holy cow please follow Mara ([cheskafave](http://cheskafave.tumblr.com)) for her beautiful beautiful art and sparkling personality; this fic is 500% cooler with her header and illustrations.  
> Also thank you to [nurseydcx](http://nurseydcx.tumblr.com), [nerdswillruletheworld](http://nerdswillruletheworld.tumblr.com), and [jlzimmz](http://jlzimmz.tumblr.com) for their tolerance of my midnight whinings for over a year about this work. Additional shoutout to my Shakespeare prof Don-John who only laughed at me a little when the words "they hunt zombies" left my mouth & who then suggested the Necronomicon plot.  
> You can follow me on tumblr [here](http://peppermintlegs.tumblr.com) for incredibly little related to Check, Please! (Protip: comment if you want my input on Jack's essay writing habits and Chowder's relationship with the mailperson in Samwell.)  
> Title from the Cranberries' "Zombie" and epigraph from Bleachers' "Wild Heart"  
> And, as always, my kingdom and heart to Ngozi for creating Check, Please! and letting me play in her sandbox.


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